Animal Crossing New Horizons and Isolation; A Year One Review
This is long LONG overdue. I planned to start writing this back in early March, but never got around to getting the motivation for it.
Today (and probably the next few days that I spend writing this) is that day.
To preface this, I am a Very Big Animal Crossing Fan. One of the first games I ever played was Wild World on the DS and New Leaf is primarily the reason I have the friends I do today. This is not something I would typically write nowadays, but Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the most time I have invested into a game within a year’s timespan EVER and I think it’s worth talking about.
What I want to do here is give an overview of what it was like playing this game for an entire year straight from its launch day. I really do mean an entire year. Sure, there were periods where I didn’t play the game for a couple of weeks here and there, but it was something that occupied my time year round, despite being a person who plays a lot of games. I’m going to talk about the way I played the game, how that evolved and with it; my relationship to it. A similar thing happened to me when I was playing New Leaf between late 2013 to late 2019 and I am going to talk about the differences between these relationships with these two games from the same series, as well as a lot of rambling about game burnout.
**FYI I’ll be putting a pretty large chunk of screenshots that I was able to pull from the past year from playing the game and will be including proper captions hopefully with something a little fun, or just to give context for the screenshot itself.***
My Experience
The best way I can describe the month or so leading up to the launch of this game was pure pandemonium. The pandemic had been going on and spreading for awhile and I was somehow pretty unaware of it at the time, despite hearing things about it around everywhere. Talking about the launch of New Horizons without talking about the pandemic is something that is impossible. The game’s launch window happening around when social distancing guidelines and restrictions were being put in place in late March is nothing short of a very very weird coincidence and no doubt contributed to the enormous amount of success it would have in the following months. It not only became the best selling Animal Crossing game of all time, but one of the best selling games on the Switch ever.
During all of this leading up to launch, to be honest the only thing I could think about was the game itself. I often have shied away in recent years from getting overly attached to a brand, but Animal Crossing means so much to me that I couldn’t really separate from it. This was one of the first games to release in the 2020s and today I am still thinking that it will be one of the games that I cite at the end of this decade for being extremely influential on me. I am aware that is a long way in the future, but I really do believe it will be that impactful.
Launch night for this game was nuts for me, it was the first time in about 2 years I had pulled an all-nighter and is the last time I pulled an all-nighter in general as of the time of writing this. My childlike excitement for this game was through the roof in a way I cannot even describe. That entire weekend, playing that game was the only thing I did. I was helplessly engrossed into it.
If you know anything about Animal Crossing, you know that it runs in real time and works on a 24 hour clock, there fore the amount of things you can do in a day is limited to how long you can occupy yourself with certain tasks before they lock themselves up until you can do them the next day or week. I am unabashedly a time traveler in Animal Crossing. I always have been. By the late afternoon the day the game had come out, I had unlocked every unlockable building and feature the game had available at the time, which in real time takes about 2–3 weeks, depending on the pace you do things at. By the time everyone was getting home to play the game, I had logged in about 15 hours already and was already making plans to redesign my entire town. It was nuts.
My obsession with decorating outside and terraforming the landscape did not stop after launch week, is the thing. This is a sort of central mechanic that was new to the series and I used it to hell and back to restructure and redecorate parts of my town up through when I stopped playing the game regularly as on late March 2021.
This constant obsession of wanting to rearrange my town over and over stemmed from the fact that I just was never satisfied with what I built. To its credit, it gave me something to do in the game though. I would build, tear down and rebuild structures over and over and over for the entire year that I played the game.
I was never satisfied, however a nice side effect of this is that my town was NEVER the same. I was constantly reshaping it, retooling certain parts of the town till I thought they were perfect. Then a couple of weeks later I would do it again because I had grown bored of the things I had made. There was something violently cathartic about that process that I can’t begin to describe. Creating something, seeing your work, deciding you don’t like it, tearing it down only to build it into something else meant I was constantly in the process of coming up with creative solutions for building structures and landmarks.
It started with simple things like an outdoor music stage and a little park square in front of the town hall, or a field that looked like it was in the middle of the country. It soon moved onto much more complex structures though. My park square became a town square with benches and meticulously placed plants, a path made of bamboo later became a board walk made for fishing and biking, with a small pier at the south side of it looking over the sea. The small flower field (as seen above) I created later became a wooded is now a wooded neighborhood with a fancy pumpkin patch and a graveyard lining the outskirts of it. The more I built new things, the more I became satisfied with them be it through gaining the skills to create more elaborate set pieces, or just having more and more fun with the ideas I was coming up with. It was probably the last time in my life I truly felt like I was in a comfortable space that let me be truly creative and create stuff that I enjoyed creating. Some might say my obsession with it was unhealthy, but it was the best I had felt about work I had done in a very long time.
The most captivating thing about New Horizons to me is it’s willingness to let you do whatever you want, which is a freedom that past games attempted to exercise, but never actually went all the way. The game’s greatest strength is its toolset. Whether or not you actually do something with that toolset is up to you, but once the ball got rolling on projects I did in this game, it never stopped. Until the burnout. But we’ll talk about that in a bit.
Welcome to the Village; Friends New & Old
Now, I’ve seen a pretty large amount of distaste towards New Horizons compared to previous entries in the series and I kind of wanted this piece to also address those things along with my experiences. I want to elaborate on the reasons I agree with some criticism, outright disagree on others and also have my own criticisms that haven’t been more widely mentioned in the Animal Crossing community.
The thing that this game did right was get its purpose across. It’s an Animal Crossing game with almost all the bells and whistles, interspersed with a deep decoration sim akin to something like Happy Home Designer on the 3DS, but on a much larger scale. In a lot of ways (which I explained earlier) it does this very successfully. In MOST ways it does this successfully. Being able to customize the island to your will is unprecedented in the series and allows for an immense amount of creativity when making stuff. The decoration aspect of the game is immensely deep and has so much room for personal expression. The game also has a lot of content when it comes to catching wildlife. This is the most fun I’ve had collecting stuff for the museum in the entire series. The ability to feel a sense of progression as you slowly fill your museum up every month bit by bit is super satisfying. It makes you feel like you’re actually working towards something that isn’t a self set goal. Alongside all this, the large amount of clothing and hair options allow you to customize your character to a point that feels like nothing else in the series. There are so many options and combinations. The amount of pictures I’ve taken of my outfits in game is monumental. As well as this, the holiday events are often extremely engaging as well, rewarding you with furniture, clothing and items that are much more beautiful than anything featured in the series before. All of this make New Horizons one of the least lackluster experiences from the perspective of someone who enjoys the types of things it has to offer.
However, the most major criticism this game seems to get is about how its NPC interactions have been toned down to a point that they don’t matter any more. This, I entirely agree with. Gone are the days where a villager will ask you to do a fun activity with them, or try to schedule a house visit. Gone is the need to trade items with villagers and get stuff in return that would otherwise be pretty hard to find. Gone are the plethora of dialogue interactions you could get with every single personality type of villager. Instead, they are replaced with rather bland creatures that say the same lines over and over. For fans of the older series, this is a massive letdown as one of the main things that older fans of the series often attribute its charm to is the social interactions you would have with these characters. The last game in the series, New Leaf, was already moving away from these deeper interactions with other villagers though. So it honestly felt inevitable. It’s one of the aspects of the game that is extremely disappointing to me and I hope it is addressed sometime in the future through and update, though that is very unlikely.
Now I want to get to the point of why exactly I stopped playing, and it’s not entirely for the reason you might think it is. Keep in mind I was keeping up with this game and its updates for the whole entire first year it was out. I was vigorously playing every update, finding every single piece of new furniture I could, grinding out the museum and building the parks and structures of my dreams, of which I eventually became very proud of.
I didn’t stop playing because of a lack of content. The game has tons of it and while it is not exactly what a lot of older Animal Crossing fans wanted, it is substantial and has deep enough customization systems to keep a player occupied for hundreds of hours as long as they’re willing to engage with those systems in a way that is fun to them.
What led me to stop playing this game was the community surrounding it, to be honest. It was the people aspect of the game. If you asked most of my friends when they stopped playing New Horizons, they would probably say it was around June or July of 2020. That’s about a 2–3 month retention rate for the game, which on its own is good. The thing about Animal Crossing is that it’s what a lot of people like to refer to as a “Forever Game”. It’s something you can consistently revisit over and over throughout the years. It isn’t exactly meant to be played like other games, as it’s treated more as a list of daily activities to do rather than a long campaign to get through at your own pace.
People stopped caring about the game when they realized it wasn’t the one they wanted. Which is perfectly valid. This type of game is not for everyone. But why was there such a large amount of people leaving the game after its launch month where there was nothing but praise over how relaxing and fun it was?
The answer lies somewhere between how personalized the game is, and the people themselves.
New Horizons is a Lonely Game
This part is going to get very personal and is indicative of specifically my experience with New Horizons. This is not what everyone has experienced. I have seen online communities flourishing through interacting with each other through this game. I would just like to explain the circumstances that led me to feel that this game was missing something that I especially wanted, but only got a taste of.
Animal Crossing has always been a social game. Even on the Gamecube & DS, sharing a space in the same town and trying to work around each other to get the most out of your play session was crucial to enjoying the game sometimes. My personal favorite of the series, New Leaf had an extremely engaging set of systems for multiplayer. Since it was on a handheld system it meant that you would typically keep your game to yourself, but withholding that fact the online components of the game were set up where having your own fun in the game was about hanging out with people in a virtual space to just hang out.
I have a large amount of endearment towards New Leaf for what it did for me during a formative time in my life. I dropped out of middle school after the first semester there and was at a complete loss for what I was supposed to do. My mom was helping me figure out how to teach myself new things on my own without the education system and for awhile I was in a sort of limbo. This all started at the beginning of 2013. It lasted until Fall of 2014, where I finally went back to that school and was able to become more comfortable in an environment like that.
Now, what exactly was I doing during that time? For my birthday in late 2013, I got my 3DS. To this day it is my favorite game console of all time and has my favorite games library of all time on it for a lot of reasons, but mostly nostalgia. Animal Crossing New Leaf is my most played game on the 3DS and it lead to a series of events that snowballed into me having all of the friends I have today. The time I spent playing that game just with other people greatly outlasts any of the time I spent by myself in it. It was an experience that I can only describe as almost dreamlike. We would often get together multiple times a week to hang out and chat in Animal Crossing of all places. At the time I didn’t have a computer or anything so my major form of communication with friends online was this game. I won’t go into excruciating detail over it, but to this day it is the most fun I’ve had playing a game with other people. Being able to hang out with someone in an online space with no restrictions on what you’re supposed to do, or what you’re not supposed to do is nothing but magical. We would come up with our own games, had running in-jokes about each other’s villagers and aspects of our towns and would constantly roleplay. There a friends from back then that I wish I could get back today, but many of them are long gone outside of the people I have kept up with today.
I had an immense amount of excitement for the online features going into New Horizons with the amount of nostalgia I have tied to the previous game and its multiplayer aspects. When the game launched, it was amazing getting to see what everyone else was doing with their towns. I loved visiting with people and just hanging out together for awhile. It was super fun. I had that itch scratched that I had missed from all those years ago in New Leaf. However, once the hype died down for the game there was this sense of quiet. Very little people in circles I was in were playing the game and the ones who were still playing it were often keeping to themselves, occupied with decorating their towns and doing all the activities there were to do.
New Horizons is a lonely game. I don’t mean that in the sense that the community isn’t active, or that people aren’t willing to be friends with each other online. I mean it in a more metaphorical sense I guess. The amount of customization options the game gives you is staggering. There is so much to do in it that it can be daunting. Daunting to a point that if you actually engage with those things, it will likely be the only thing you do for awhile. What followed the release of this game after a couple of months of people being active in the game and visiting other’s towns was a loud silence. The people that were still playing the game were deep in it and it seems as if the fact that it is so reliant on self expression of every aspect, people turned inward and were often focusing only on their creations. It happened to me as well.
New Horizons is what I would say the first time in the series where it felt less about community and more about personal satisfaction. You saw it not only in the way people treated their islands as these personal canvases that nobody else can touch, but also in the way that the people who were disappointed by the game left it after it wasn’t the game they wanted and it didn’t give them what they personally wished out of a new Animal Crossing. The only times afterwards where people would get together was during holidays and new content updates. Those were the moments of respite I got from what I would otherwise call the least community focused and most single player Animal crossing game in the entire series. In its own way, that approach is entirely valid and works in its favor a lot of ways.
I already explained how much I loved creating and building new stuff all over my town. It isn’t bad inherently. The thing is, while everyone online was complaining about a lack of consistent updates, saying that The Roost still isn’t back in the game, Kapp’n isn’t in the game etc. ; I was thinking about how nobody was playing the game together anymore. It really started to hit me at the beginning of 2021 though. I had spent about 9 months playing this game with only a few moments where I got to play with others and enjoy the game together. The main thing New Horizons missed out on for me wasn’t a lack of features. It was a lack of empathy; which is what I would more or less call a “Hidden Feature” in the past games.
Both the game itself and its fanbase are no longer focused on what the series used to be about; community and the inherent good you can do through it.
Funny thing is, I picked the game back up after I started writing this article. it got me in the mood and I have been slowly picking up my Switch every couple of days to play it. The magic is still there, it just isn’t in the same form as it was before. I would like to reiterate that I think New Horizons does a fantastic job at what it sets out to do. This piece was more or less me airing out my frustrations about some of the charm its lost. There is charm in other aspects of the game now that weren’t there before though. This game is just an entirely different beast from any that came before it.
To close out, I just wanna post some of the screenshots I have left over that were not included in the rest of the article. I think it shows that the same kind of fun with friends CAN still be had in this game. community exists in it, the game itself just makes it a lot harder to form those connections. I also just wanna post some pretty pics I took so I can keep them in one place for posterities' sake. There will be no captions, just get a feel for them yourself and see if you might understand what I love so much about this series.
