Impressions: Animal Crossing New Horizons

This is going to be a starkly different first impressions piece than last week.

Whereas I am an ancient veteran of the Final Fantasy franchise, I have never, ever played any Animal Crossing games before.

The impressions therefore are going to be a little weird. I have no encyclopedic knowledge of what came before informing my writing. I could end up marveling at something that would read as ridiculously as me going on about how much a revolutionary game changer having magic in FF7R is.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons (and doubtlessly, its predecessors) unwraps its gameplay very slowly. While there’s always something to do, there are a lot of time gates to the gameplay as you wait for dawn of the next real life day for construction projects to finish, opening up new material (including the next construction project).

…Except for the first “day”. All you can do at the start is run around ⅓ of the island, set up your tent and pick a few things up off the ground to make a bonfire. But after these basic tasks are done the game then passes an in-game day for you before running in real time. Heaven help you if you started the game late at night.

As the structure of the game does seem built around not give you too many new gameplay wrinkles each day, it can feel like an elongated tutorial — which I’m apparently still in despite 5 days of gameplay progression. But it doesn’t come with “assist mode” features, and most long explanations can be skipped. Those that can’t (and all text in general) can be sped up. It’s more New Horizons’ vibe to just tell you what you can do now and then patiently await you to get around to it without locking you out of other activities. Though the game allowing you to pace yourself as slowly as you like makes the fact that there’s a hard limit on how fast you can go all the more noticeable.

Though going fast doesn’t seem to be the point of the game. When it comes down to it, there’s really only five gameplay loops to partake in: gathering and crafting resources, collecting things, designing/decorating things, engaging in oddball conversations with the NPCs and stumbling upon random (and not-so-random) events. Depending on what’s next on the checklist, these activities can be used for the game’s major progression milestones of making a functional improvement to the town or an expansion to your house… but not more than once a day (each).

While it sounds simplistic, I’ve found a fair amount to like about it. It shares a lot of the hooks with The Sims and Tomodachi Life that I enjoyed. While you could grind the game neigh endlessly, no one thing requires anywhere close to a MMO- or Gatcha-level amount of resources. It doesn’t take long at all to set yourself a creative goal and then just go out and do it.

And on the other hand, I find myself aimlessly puttering around. Moving trees. Catching bugs and fish. Planting flowers and hedges. Watching the rain fall (I’ve had rain on 3 of the five days, and one of those clear days was the first, when I didn’t get any sun anyway). Learning the right way to bonk a rock. Trying to re-create some of my real-world clothing in the pixel art creator. I made a really good hockey jersey. And though this, I think I found the game’s true calling: A virtual zen garden for me to empty my head with by idly dragging my figurative rake through.

I can see why it appears to be the social media’s quarantine game of choice.

(I can also see that every creative in the Japanese multimedia entertainment industry spent their entire childhoods doing nothing but fishing and catching bugs, and are convinced that kids these days do the exact same thing. These two activities are downright pervasive in anime and games of an appropriate setting.)

Multiplayer — which you can do without a Nintendo Switch Online account if you and your friend’s Switches are not social distancing — is a simple experience you don’t get to do until game day 3 (while not a milestone on its own, you still have to wait for it to open). There’s not too much to it. You can visit a friend’s island, shop in their stores (if any) steal fruit from their trees. In return, they can show off their pad, stuff, outfits, designs and so forth.

But like the general game’s simplicity, it really is enough. The game is a canvas, the gameplay is you painting on it.