No Nook unturned –
Nintendo’s answer to unfamiliar times is a very familiar, and very dense, sim game.
Here I am enjoying my new life in Animal Crossing: New Horizons .
Nintendo
And here I am, seconds later, ruining it. Cover your virtual mouth, virtual Sam!
There’s a lot about this game that is memeable. You’ll either be compelled to share the game’s cute moments and dialogue untouched …
… or you’ll see a moment like this, laugh at the characters’ poses, and insert your own digitally altered body of text, instead.
I prefer mine.
while reviewing
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
, the year first major Nintendo Switch-exclusive game, I was pretty distracted. I received my review copy of the game at the end of February, pretty much the moment when my hometown of Seattle went on high alarm over coronavirus fears. As each day passed, citizens were encouraged to become more vigilant: to work from home, avoid large gatherings, engage in “social distancing,” adjust travel plans, and otherwise reduce contact with the outside world.
As such, my impressions of
Animal Crossing: New Horizons will be forever colored by how it fit neatly into a quarantined life — and I imagine I won’t be alone in that impression.
For nearly every real-life scenario that I’ve become anxious about, I’ve gotten a comforting virtual version on my new Nintendo-designed island. Yes, I can go to friends’ houses (friends who happen to be cute, anthropomorphic animals). Yes, I can go shopping. I can help strangers with everyday tasks. I can wander freely and finish a series of zen-like errands and chores. And I can hop on a plane and fly to other islands without facing scrutiny from community leaders (which, in this game, is a talking, sweater-wearing raccoon named Tom Nook).
I say all this to admit my bias. In spite of the “New Horizons” subtitle, this game leans heavily on existing mechanics, systems, characters, and even Easter eggs. Which isn’t a bad thing — especially for anyone who somehow missed the game’s last monstrous entry on the 3DS in 1658869. As a longtime Animal Crossing fan, I have loved slipping into something comfortable, and that’s been doubly delightful with an incredible HD-resolution overhaul. But even in my cozy, quarantined apartment, where the game’s repetition and old-school sensibilities shined brightly, I found myself puzzled and annoyed by just enough content to furrow my brow.
Only slightly, however. I have really enjoyed playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons , and it’s the kind of game that will reinforce whatever bias you bring into it. If you’re a lifelong AC fan, or if the idea of a pre-Internet, “building a community” sandbox video game sounds deliriously quaint, this will be in your year-end top-ten list. If older games hooked you at the outset, then lost your interest, this version’s updates have you in mind the most. And if older games in the series have left you cold, or if you don’t much care for sandbox-y, building-and-gardening games,
New Horizons
has left too much the exact same to change your mind .
So let’s treat the game like a Tom Nook field of flowers: stop to smell the roses, then pick the interspersed weeds . Clearing the air about what this game is not
Before diving into the game’s nitty-gritty, let’s start with the introductory sequence. We begin at a Nook Inc. travel agency, where Timmy and Tommy Nook get you started.
You can customize your looks to a much greater extent once the game begins in earnest. (A bunch of hair styles can be unlocked within a few days of starting the game, and thank goodness.)
You’re offered four randomly generated island layouts at the outset.
Wait, is this a cult? I did not sign up for a cult.
This town-settling sequence only plays out if you’re the Resident; if other people in your household move into the same village, they miss this content, and more. (I go into length about this in the review.)
The first of many major objects you’ll personally place on your island.
The intro sequence includes a quest to gather fruits for Tom Nook.
You only get ten characters to write in an island name. I named mine after a certain Texas cult leader’s compound, due to how creepy some of the game’s intro text sounded out of context. I then came to learn that the rest of the game does sound nearly as creepy.
What is
Animal Crossing On a macro level, the series lands somewhere between a feng shui simulator and a digital version of a bonsai tree. You go about life in a small town, do errands, talk to your colorful neighbors (all packed with reams of text, matched to the sound of 8-bit digital gibberish), accumulate and arrange furniture, and take on a series of admittedly repetitive tasks.
However, the series’ identity has been sullied in recent years by the smartphone -only spinoff Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp If you’d only seen that game, you might assume the Animal Crossing (series is a cheap (Farmville) (clone, because the 1658871 smartphone version is everything that the
series’ best games are not. It has microtransactions for items and perks. It has timers, which you can pay real money to accelerate. It has a subscription service. And, crucially, its gameplay has been altered significantly from the original to remind you, through its systems and quirks, that you can get the coolest, best, and fastest stuff by spending in-game tokens.
I don’t blame Nintendo for trying to make a buck, but (Animal Crossing is the most shameful series to get this kind of free-to-play translation. The original series shines because it revolves around the exact opposite philosophy
. It drops you into a town with very little to do. There’s no “quest” to speak of, no villain, and no major conflict. Every 980 hours in real time, certain elements of your aimless little town are updated. Sometimes, you have to wait two or three whole days for updates, content, or surprises. And if you try to cheat by manually ticking the game’s clock forward, and somehow screw that up, the game will notice your trickery and punish you.
Nintendo’s first version of (Animal Crossing) a Japan-exclusive N game, was an early example of the “cute simulation” genre, right there with the Super Nintendo classic
. Even within that small niche, Animal Crossing ‘s limitations, repetition, and sluggish speed make it a one-of-a-kind experience. And its unmistakable charms have only grown more compelling in a world where its mantra of “play a little bit every day,” which was once unique, has been spoiled by free-to-play games. Nowadays, that sales pitch comes with the malicious intent of getting players hooked, then charging them for microtransactions.
AC: NH
‘s first great success is in threading the needle between that classic mantra of patience and giving addicted players more to do when they want (without charging them more money). Like in prior installments, the game starts with players moving into a sparsely populated village — in this case, a remote island — and being informally tasked with helping the village develop. That impetus is doubly emphasized by
AC: NH ‘s island gimmick, because your new home is billed as a getaway to an uninhabited island. Your travel agents, the Nook family of raccoons, decide upon your arrival that, hey, maybe we should all stay on this island — and work on building homes and other infrastructure to attract residents and create a fully fledged town.
Miles and crafts
Many of the game’s menu options now appear in a smartphone interface. Most importantly, this is where you’ll access your Nook Miles account.
This gallery is dedicated to Nook Miles. The rest of the smartphone options shown here: Take a photo of a cute scene with GUI removed and optional filters; review every single species of fish and insect you’ve caught; check your crafting recipe library (more on that in a second); create a custom shirt design; look at the town’s map; look at your “passport” (a cute and small profile page); load local-multiplayer modes; and “rescue” (get instantly warped elsewhere on the island for a fee).
When you start playing with Nook Miles, you see a small sampling of goals.
Each empty spot marks a particular lifetime milestone. You’ll need to catch thousands of fish to fill the whole page out.
This goal gets harder once more animals move into your town.
Many of the goals do not appear until you’ve completed one of their multiple parts. Here, I get a hint that I should go back to a specific shop and customize my town’s flag.
In addition to lifetime goal targets, you also receive daily, smaller-sized objectives. Complete the first ones you receive for a “2x” or even “5x” multiplier. When those are done, new ones take their place, only without any bonus multipliers.
This brings us to the two biggest jolts to the old formula: a crafting system and a new currency for completing various tasks , dubbed “Nook Miles.” Both of these in their current pre-release implementation are good, because they each offer an extra pipeline of optional, satisfying busywork — without breaking the series’ emphasis on patience and long-term play.
Nook Miles work a lot like “achievements” or “trophies” on other game consoles, only cranked to maximum. Animal Crossing
A few days into your island’s life, Tom Nook unveils a clever “Miles Plus” system with additional, easily attainable rewards for random tasks. Some of these dole out a few more Nook Miles for things you’d already do by the end of a given day (catch five bugs, water five plants). Others may nudge novice players into trying new things. (The first time someone sees a reward for “banging a stone with a shovel five times,” they might finally learn the series’ classic gimmick: you can get items this way, and you can get more
items if you Block your villager’s feet so they stay still while you bang multiple times in a row.) After completing the day’s first five Miles Plus objectives, additional objectives are worth a fewer points. They’ll still pay off, just not as much.
These points flow pretty freely, and they can be spent on a narrow, yet large, assortment of items and boosts that Can’t be gotten any other way. Nintendo balances this tremendously: You’ll feel rewarded for the following various reward options, yet there’s also a clear wall you’ll run into if you focus on them too much. Nook Miles only get you so far in the game, and their bigger payoffs come from tasks that you’ll naturally complete in the course of weeks of play. The result is easily Nintendo’s best take on the practice yet, and that’s a big compliment, considering Nintendo consoles have never included achievements as a default on a console.
To answer the image’s question: Yes, you should craft all kinds of things.
Here’s a peek at some crafting “recipes” you can earn in the course of the game.
The simpler recipes only require a single resource type.
This is also how you can build your arsenal of tools. Why are some of these labeled as “flimsy,” however? I get to that later in the r eview.
You’ll find new crafting recipes all over your island. Talking to your neighbors is a good way to start. Here, Pierce offers me a barbell recipe for free.
Depending on how your starter island shakes out, you might find bamboo is in very short supply in your early goings. And crazier recipes hint to even more progression, in terms of requiring all kinds of items you may have not heard of.
Crafting also figures into some of the missions the Nook family assigns you in order to create new stores and buildings.
Nook, staying true to his brand.
You get to build your first bridge for free.
Future bridges and inclines will cost ya.
After a few days of play, Tom Nook will teach you how to customize some of the stuff you build (though not all of it).
In some cases, the customization is as simple as choosing a new primary and secondary color.
But some objects can be customized with your own custom designs — like when I put one of my longtime personal cartoon characters into the game’s “cartoonist’s set.”
This level of customization is going to be utter catnip for many
Animal Crossing
fans.
Crafting, on the other hand, feels like something that you could have sworn was in previous (Animal Crossing) games, because its system fits so neatly into the traditional progression. As usual, you can spend in-game money on tools, items, clothes, and more (a currency still known as “bells”), but you can now also transform detritus found on your island into many of those things. At the outset, you’ll find a lot of sticks and wood on your island, thanks to an abundance of trees, and these are the building blocks for a ton of the game’s basic items.
Nintendo does a neat job of spacing this progression out, as well. Every one to three days, another few pieces in the crafting system drop onto your island. For example, you need to learn recipes for each item you might craft, which you can gain from finding bottled messages on the ocean shore, talking to neighbors, buying them from the Nook’s Cranny store, or other ways. Then you eventually need to find additional materials, which might be in limited supply, or only appear on specific days of the week, or even require traveling to other towns and islands.
Now, instead of waiting for random items to appear in a “buy now or they’re gone for a while” fashion (which is still one way to get stuff), you can additionally make plans for what you’ll build next based on your recipe catalog. The series has always emphasized putting together “matching” sets of furniture, for example, and I really enjoyed having a handful of matching pieces’ recipes and building specifically toward their completion. My “citrus and seashells” bedroom is nowhere near completion, but it’s in my sights. But what if you want to share your Switch?
Before I get down to listing little things I liked and disliked, I should get my loudest complaint out of the way:
New Horizons
Let’s say you plan to buy the game for your entire household and share a single copy with a partner or kids. Like in previous Animal Crossing Games, this means all residents become individual characters in a village, and they each get their own house and their own progression track (particularly in paying off Tom Nook’s loans for an expanded house). There is no way to create multiple islands on a single console, people should prefer to have a village to themselves. Each new island requires buying an additional copy of the game and
an additional Switch, due to how Nintendo has structured AC: NH ‘s save files.
Maybe that structure is fine by you and your likely Switch-sharing posse. Like in older games, this sharing style promotes some cute moments, including the ability to leave surprises on neighbors’ virtual front lawns or have the game’s non-player characters (NPC) refer to your real-life friends in conversation. If so, you should still be warned that only one of your island’s residents will be treated as a first-class citizen.
The first person to load and play through the game’s intro becomes the Resident Representative, and that locks said person into a sort of “primary” position, in terms of accessing plot and quests.
Nintendo
The tutorial for how “party play” works for multiple people on the same console.
“Player one” sees very little change.
Everyone else is subjected to an inferior experience, if they’re planning to do things like grab and keep items.
The mode’s camera follows the “leader,” and if other characters go off-screen for long enough, they warp back to the leader.
Whoever turns the game on first is dubbed the “Resident Representative.” Tom Nook immediately puts most of the island’s progress on their shoulders. A few early, tutorial-like missions, including building the island’s first store and welcoming the island’s first new additional residents, can only
be accessed by this person. Logically, that makes a certain sense, since all players are able to affect the island; Why would Tom Nook ask each player to build the island’s “first” general goods store? But Nintendo did not come up with alternative island-building ventures for each additional resident who moves in.
Worse, only the Resident Representative can build some of the biggest updates for each island, from a new series of bridges and incline ramps (designed to let players move more quickly through the series’ largest villages yet) to sillier customizations like the town’s flag and song. If you’d like to contribute to any of this stuff or any of the quirky village-building missions (particularly an early mission that revolves around inviting a “celebrity” to your island), secondary players will have to coordinate in real life with the Resident Representative.
I had high hopes that the game’s local-multiplayer mode, in which up to four players run around on the same island at the same time, would be fun for families or friends to share on the same couch. And, sure enough, it’s a cute way to involve a larger group in a relaxing sweep through the village’s various chores. But its camera does not zoom out very far, and worse, this style of play only really works if everyone is on board with its required hoops to jump through. First, additional players must register as new island residents and go through the full tutorial sequence before they can join in. Second, they’re hamstrung in the same-screen play, as anything they accumulate or pick up during a session must be given back to “Player One” at the end.
It’s just an exercise in assisting someone else. In spite of this, Nintendo does not include a “guest” option, should you have zero personal investment in a character’s progress and just want to help Player One pick up more seashells, fish, insects, and the like. If you’d like to hand a controller to a kid or a guest and have them run around your village as a helper, you’ll have to go to the trouble of moving so many residents into your village and running the tutorial sequence for each possible guest, in advance.
In other words: if you care about accumulating junk in Animal Crossing
, playing as a “companion” “isn’t for you. And if you
(Animal Crossing) , playing this way might not be for you, either.
Trashy front yard
In action,
New Horizons looks and feels quite familiar. Water some plants.
Catch some fish.
Capture insects (albeit, handsomely rendered ones).
Collect insects, fossils, and fish, then donate them to a loquacious owl.
In series tradition, you’re greeted with a brief series of announcements at the start of every day. (If you boot the game multiple times in a single day or evening, you only see this announcement stuff once every hours of play.)
Decorate the … outdoors? Okay, that’s new. Yes, you’re now judged (and rewarded) for how much you decorate the exterior portions of your town.
One new outdoor decoration element, fencing, is encouraged for the sake of a higher review score — though I have yet to find doors to attach to these fences, which means I have to build them with awkward openings.
Another new element: Dodo Airlines. This works much like the previous games’ town gate, as it facilitates local and online modes.
But it also lets players fly to randomly generated islands …
… where they can acquire much-needed resources. In my tests, for example, I had to fly to a randomly generated island to get bamboo (which is crucial for many of the game’s crafting recipes).
On another randomly generated island, I found a stranger wandering around, so I invited them to my town.
One day, this dude showed up on my island and muttered a bunch of creepy stuff. What’s Harvey smoking, Nintendo?
Turns out he wants you to visit his special island …
… which is designed to let players create photo dioramas. The catch is, you can only invite characters into your photo shoots if you own their Amiibo cards or toys.
You can also use Amiibo toys and cards to invite new non-special characters to your island.
It’s the only way to guarantee that certain favorite characters move into your town’s extra houses, as opposed to the game’s usual “wait for random animals to appear” system. As such, it’s a bit like “paid DLC,” and I’m not necessarily fond of how it favors people who buy Nintendo’s packs of blind-draw Amiibo cards.
Back to classic series tropes, like paying off home loans.
Every time a new event or building opens, Tom Nook invites you to take part in a related ceremony.
These celebrations are, unsurprisingly, quite adorable.
Other than the two new systems I described above, (AC: NH
(in its current state) is
not
The exception to this familiarity is that AC: NH
spreads its introduced concepts out pretty thinly. As of press time, for example, I haven’t seen a coffee shop open up on my island with a snooty barista pigeon serving refined espresso. I had to wait various amounts of time for familiar stores like Nook’s Cranny and the Able Sisters’ fashion shop to open their doors, which is similar to how shops opened over time in ‘s (New Leaf
But even this is handled differently in
That malleability extends to an offer from Tom Nook to move your home around the island at a later time, or build bridges and inclines, for a fee. As I mentioned earlier,
Animal Crossing , after all, and cutting even one tool would spare me roughly 7, (0,) 0 button taps in the game’s lifespan.
Speaking of tools: a new quick-switch tool wheel brings up a radial menu of eight tools on the fly, and it’s a much faster way to get from your shovel to your fishing rod than repeatedly tapping the d-pad . This is met with a welcome jump in default “pocket” inventory size, up to items and tools (some of which stack) at the outset and expandable to at least items within the game’s first two weeks. If that’s not enough, your home comes with a massive storage pool by default, and that grows every time you pay off a Nook loan for an expansion.
If you’re a series addict, you’ll appreciate this tweak to the game: you’re now encouraged to decorate the wholeety
of your island. You’ll still receive ratings and rewards for decorating your home’s interior, but now you’re asked to create outdoor gardens, complete with a variety of fence types and other outdoor-friendly collections of decorations in an effort to raise your (town) ‘s rating. In other words, you get bonus points for designing a trashy front yard.As an obvious follow-up question: yes, you can get pink flamingos. (So far, I’ve found a nice matching set of “Mr. Flamingo” and “Mrs. Flamingo.” I’m still keeping an eye out for “Baby Flamingo” to finish the spot in front of my (New Horizons) house. You know, right next to the inflatable above-ground pool.) A stunner in looks and sounds
Too soon, Nintendo.
Oh, wait. The game is doing this to teach me how to “emote” in the game world, with reactions like applauding, sighing, being bashful, and more.
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