Hello, y’all welcome to my dumpster where all I’ve been doing pretty much is playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Honestly speaking there has never been a better time to play something like this and to just relax while the whole world is on fire.
Animal Crossing is a game where you get to customise a cute villager character and become essentially the right hand man to Tom Nook on this island getaway thingy. Tom starts you out with basic tasks and you pretty soon find out that this game is nothing but collecting things, crafting, decorating, and coming to terms with the fact that you have a horrible hoarding addiction.
Alongside you will be other villagers who you can meet either by visiting new islands, or they can come to visit you! You get to choose what villager you want after the first two and then it all comes down to making your island the best that you want it to be. Decorate, garden, landscape, and do whatever you can till you get K.K. Slider to show up to your Island, once you get him to perform at your island you pretty much have beaten the game, but it’s never over for someone with as destructive habits like mine!
All of this is done through the simplest gameplay I think a game like this could have, it’s easy, it’s cute and it’s thematically all appropriate. The end goal of the game is whatever you want it to be and the developers really allowed the players to let their imagination run wild. What other game would ever allow you to spend 6 hours trying to catch two snapping turtles so you can make a turtle boxing arena in your own house with an audience and even a bell. Personally, the games brought out some manic psychopath in me so I’m just rude to villagers and block them off from hanging from the cool ones if they were ugly or lame. Oh, and turtle fights. That’s just how I get my kicks apparently I’m learning all this pretty recently too so don’t be worried cause I am too.
In all seriousness, everything about this game has led to such a relaxing experience. From the music to the aesthetic to the calming, and slow gameplay that all runs in real-time, so if you’re not a time traveler you play according to the pace of what a day can offer you. And because there are events and different things happening and are set to happen all throughout this game’s life cycle we’ll be seeing a lot more to do pretty often. With the game having online functionality as well you can do all sorts of wacky stuff with your friends like send each other gifts, bully villagers, smack each other with nets.
All of this is fantastic honestly. It’s probably the most invested I’ve been in a game in a very long time and that’s saying something! But if there was one problem I had with this game it was that it didn’t have a certain quality of life features that I felt like are a little necessary at this point. Not being able to make multiple things while crafting and a lot of others things related to crafting actually. For a game that is meant to be slow crafting 50 chairs to sell cause it’s the hot item of the day is gonna suck for anyone regardless.
Overall I’d say I had and am still having a great experience with it, and I’d wholeheartedly recommend this game to pretty much anyone who wants to relax and distract themselves from the fact that they’re swarms of locusts appearing in the world and the apocalypse is near.