Animal Crossing

It looks, at least at first, like a vacation. You book your ticket through Nook Inc., by all appearances a cheerful travel agent, coordinating with Dodo Airlines for a trip to a deserted island somewhere in the hemisphere of your choice. But its different. For whatever reasonpersonal, political, biological or otherwise, it will never be clearyour cheerful little character has decided to book a one way ticket. I wear a sailor shirt and jeans, and I am never going back.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the latest entry in Nintendos pleasant little life simulator series, but the setting marks an interesting break. In the past I was just moving to a town, a normal thing that one might do, even if the town is inhabited by strange and friendly anthropomorphic animals. Now, I am striking out into the wilderness to build a utopia on a deserted island. My guide is Tom Nook, a scheming raccoon whose calm, half-lidded eyes belie the essential fervor with which he will pursue his latest venture, a grand social experiment far beyond the construction business he ran on the mainland. My companions on this first day are a disaffected pink rhino and a fitness-obsessed elephant, their motivations for abandoning society as unclear as my own. Joining us are Tom Nooks two sons, Timmy and Tommy, the mother nowhere to be seen and never mentioned. We pitch our tents on the first day, and I go out to shake cherries out of a tree at Nooks request. We gather around a bonfire and drink cherry juice as the sun goes down, toasting the start of our new life without a thought to what we left behind. This is life now, here on the island. And we will make it a good one.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Its impossible to review Animal Crossing: New Horizons here on March 16, 2020, without writing in the shadow of the coronavirus. That might not be true of all gamesDOOM Eternal will still be DOOM Eternal, even if it is perhaps more needed now than it would have been last year. But there is something about the particular escapism of Animal Crossings simple life that feels particularly vital at a time when death tolls and infection rates are rising, whole cities are shutting down, the global economy is fumbling to a halt and millions of people are choosing to spend their days indoors, alone. In the past few weeks, a collective howl to just release the game earlyhas come up on social media in a way that it cant quite for any other game. We need a new life right now because this one is looking tenuous.

The game is simple: you live on the island and you make it better. You start in a tent, you upgrade to a house, and then you improve the house. You catch butterflies and fish. You collect fruit, and you sell them to Tom Nooks sons as Nook Sr. talks constantly about the island way. You give gifts to your friends and they reward you with clothing and housewares. If you support Tom Nooks amorphous goals, he will give you Nook Miles, which you can use to fly to even more isolated islands to find lost souls camping out alone in the wilderness who can be persuaded to join your growing community. There is a museum where you can bring all the bugs, fish and fossils you can find to create a slowly expanding record of your own achievement: for the most part you are alone in its silent, impressive beauty, but sometimes you will see another island inhabitant peering into the fish tank that you stocked. You can build a wardrobe at your little workbench, choose a custom color and place it in your house to put on a hat when it rains.

Its a game of rhythms. There are always bugs and fish, you can spend your spare time catching those when theres nothing else to do. Every so often you can go to the beach to check for seashells. You can hit a rock for minerals once a day. If you find a rare fruit not available on your island you can plant a tree, but it will take a few days to grow. If you request construction, it will be available in the morning. Larger buildings might take a full day to complete. I havent seen it in the review period, but as the seasons passes we will see different fish and bugs, different environments and different clothes on your friends. You could put on warmer clothes in cold seasons, but you dont have to. It is after all, utopia.

Two weeks into my play and my island is unrecognizable from when I first moved in. My and my friends tents have been replaced by permanent houses, my own with three rooms stocked with haphazard furniture, an espresso grinder on the floor next to my record player. My two original companions are joined by a friendly green eagle, a squirrel with a flight helmet, and a small, nervous, bearded creature of indeterminate species. I found a drunk seagull on the beach one day that I havent seen since. Theyre joined by the owl that runs the museum, a hedgehog that sells clothes on the weekends, a travelling carpet-selling camel, and a weird little rodent thing that sells turnips on Sundays. The turnips fluctuate wildly in price, and you can make a lot of money selling them at the right time throughout the week because this utopia veers wildly between aggressive capitalism and essential collectivism. Ive got a sleeping bag that I put on the beach next to a little camping lantern and a palm tree that will be full grown at the time of publication. I lie on it sometimes.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons

There are games that you play in quick sessions, and there are games that stretch into weeks, months, and years. Animal Crossing: New Horizons is one of the latter. These games are never about what they are about, whether youre shooting aliens to earn powerful guns, slashing demons with axes to collect ever grander armor, or planting orange trees so that you can see them blossom. Thats just window dressing. They are about the feeling that you get when you log into the game every day and make progress: that you can earn your bells and build your island, and that nothing can really take it away from you. Not a stock market crash or a malicious strand of RNA worming its way through cells and society. Furniture and clothing are made available randomly through rotating stocks at stores and the whims of your gift-giving friends. But even if you throw something out, its added to a list where you can buy it again as long as you want. Nothing is lost, ever.

Much has been made of Nintendos decision to limit Animal Crossing: New Horizons to one island per Switch, with limited cloud saves and a procedure for recovering data that would have felt dated a decade ago. I can understand, in a practical way, why these are insane, anti-consumer decisions that are bound to cause unnecessary heartbreak. But I also understand them. The utility of Animal Crossing relies on a sense of being real. Theres only one island on on Switch because that island is real, and it lives on that Switch. Youre not meant to change date to switch the season because its just not that season yet. It seeks peace in surrender, core to the Animal Crossing experience.

I havent talked a lot about the game itself, really. Theres a bunch of stuff old and new here, like the ability to choose where people live, the way the island evolves, the DIY system that lets you make your own stuff, streamlined inventory management, the multiplayer system, the way you can now create and destroy land at a whim, etc. If you want to know more about that stuff, Im sure there will be lots of other reviews that will go into them. But know that if youre overwhelmed with the world, stuck inside, or adrift in a life that you know will look totally different next week get Animal Crossing.

For a score, Im going with 10. It is by no means perfect, but, we would never want it to be.

A review code was provided for the purposes of this review.

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Animal Crossing: New Horizons Review: The Game We All Need, Right Now - Forbes