![]() ![]() Likewise, there’s no chance that anyone that comes to live on the island is anything but a doe-eyed angel, and there’s no risk of running out of anything in your endless pursuit of stuff to build and add to your home and environment you can take an axe to a tree and it’ll drop a couple of pieces of wood, but that tree’s never coming down and it’ll have a new supply of resources for you to tap the very next day. homelessness, starvation, social ostracisation and death) that the game is almost naively nice about the very ideology, but nonetheless we all love it because it’s oh-so- nice about it. It helps that Animal Crossing helpfully (and conveniently) does away with any consequences for not doing capitalism well enough (i.e. We all joke about how Tom Nook is a vile capitalist, and he absolutely is, dumping massive loans on you with a chuckle and a wink, but he’s so friendly about it that even the most rabid Marxists among us still love him. It says something about humanity’s innate desire to hoard that filling a house with stuff (most of which is not interactive and therefore pointless as a gameplay mechanic) is so appealing, and Animal Crossing taps into that with perfection.Įverything in Animal Crossing is so firmly committed to being nice that it’s almost dangerously sweet. And, of course, there’s the appeal of slowly filling up your growing house with all kinds of fun junk. “I caught a catfish! I’m more of a dogfish person” is my favourite for the pure dad jokiness of it. The little quips that pop up whenever you catch a fish are eminently screenshot-worthy stuff. Every activity you undertake is imbued with charm, too. The big, bold animal characters that roam around the village have more subtle and nuanced personality than they should thanks to their adorable little responses and actions, and the way the world rolls as through you’re on a little cylinder adds a serene gracefulness and the sense that you’re reading a particularly vivid animated pop-up book. It’s excellent, and the reason that it’s so appealing is immediately clear from looking at any single screenshot: New Horizons has a layer of charm and polish that is executed with such precision that it can be actually difficult to pin down and understand how the development team managed to pull it off so well. Now that’s not to say it’s a bad game, because it’s not bad at all. But I’ve got to say what I have got to say, and I didn’t love Animal Crossing: New Horizons quite as much as I’m apparently meant to. It happens every time a Nintendo game trends high and sells a lot of copies if you say anything other than “it’s the perfect game,” you inevitably get yelled at for having the audacity of having an opinion. Deep breath here, because what I’m about to say is going to get me in a lot of trouble with a certain category of people.
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