Animal Crossing: New Horizons Turns 4 Today. I’m Still Playing it.

Alexa, play K.K. Cruisin'

Animal Crossing: New Horizons turns 4 years old today. It's a game most people have left behind at this point, as even its dramatic 2.0 update is over 2 years old now. It's a game commonly characterized as lacking in content, and particularly as lacking the hooks and charm of previous entries. 

I only played a bit of New Leaf before diving in to New Horizons on launch night back in 2020 (shudder), so I can't speak to how successful that game was versus the games that came before it. But I can tell you this: New Leaf has only ever held my interest for a few weeks at a time, whenever the mood strikes me to dust it off and create a new town. Meanwhile, I'm still playing New Horizons, and I never stopped. 

If I showed you my New Horizons island as it currently manifests, you probably wouldn't believe me when I tell you I have over 800 hours logged in the game. That's because I've started up and scorched-earth erased more islands than I can count at this point. My vague recollection of past island layouts would be enough to fill a small zine.

The reason is thus: it is genuinely more convenient to erase an island off the face of the earth than it is to manually move all your Villager houses out of the way, to dig up every single plant and re-terraform the land underneath it all so it resembles a kind of a blank canvas to work with. 

Like, I cannot stress enough that to dig up and reposition flowers in this game, you have to manually dig up every single flower, all of which take up an entire inventory slot, then one at a time replant them somewhere else. At any point in this process, your shovel could break, and you'll have to go and buy a new one, because there is no way to get unbreakable tools in this game, in spite of the fact that the loose ‘island survival and crafting’ premise gives way to ‘creative island customiser’ within a couple of weeks of starting up a fresh save. 

And it's exactly that survival-game-cosplay first two weeks that I just trudged my way through for the millionth time. I’d love to say I found the experience loathsome, but  if we're being really, really honest here, I always really enjoy the variety that going through those early days motions represents, versus the static, repetitive feeling that soon comes over any effective New Horizons island. 

In a game like this, one that’s primarily about being rewarded with the chance to look at absolutely gorgeous 3D models, it's really exciting to go back to a fresh save and briefly see models like Villager Tents, Tom Nook’s Tent, The early shop design, and especially Blathers’ tent. The inside of that thing is one of my favourite spaces in the entire game. 

My absolute favourite thing about the early game is that Tom Nook does the daily announcements every time you open the game for the day. He does it outside, with all of the game's gorgeous outdoor sound design on full display. He even does it in the rain! In isolation that might seem like a minor detail, but after literal years of watching Isabelle cycle through the same handful of dialogue chunks, sitting in that same spot in resident services, getting to go back outside and briefly touch grass with Tom Nook always manages to feel like a revelation.

At its core, the thing that gets me through all of the tedium and friction all over New Horizons is the island/house customisation tool on the other side. But I honestly don't think I'd still be playing this thing after four years if they'd made any of this stuff easy to do, or less idiosyncratic in its presentation. Some examples:

• I have to grind bells manually, shaking a bunch of fruit off my trees to get money to move my island houses one in-game day at a time. 

• The fact that it took me two real world game sessions to build a cliff (and I’d do it again)

• The fact that every single menu is formatted differently, with varying degrees of nested options, and themes, and island locations. 

• If I want to get some new vegetables to grow, I have to go to the airport, ask the dodo to fly, select Harv's island, sit through a loading screen, run up to Leif (who I had to pay 100,000 bells and wait an in game day to get here) to finally see what two vegetable options he has today. 

• Changing the colour of some items requires customizing them at a crafting bench with customisation kits purchased in the Nook shop, while others require a different Harv's island dude (also 100k bells), and I don't know which it'll be until I've tried one to see if it works. 

• There's an ATM in resident services with a nook shopping section and a redeem nook miles section and some of the furniture comes as recipes while others don't 

• There's a new KK song every day buried at the bottom of a nook shopping menu, and that gets delivered in a cardboard box in your email, while nook miles orders get delivered in a present box

• You famously can't use items in your house storage while trying to use a crafting table in your house 

• Some randomly generated islands you can visit require a nook miles ticket purchased in resident services, then redeemed at the airport, while others require giving Kappn’ at the pier on one side of your island 1000 bells and sitting through one of his initially charming singalongs. 

I could go on. New Horizons is a game that constantly gets in its own way. Which gives me, a budding island designer, plenty of time to fill my mental stack of tasks, while engaging with whatever unintentional tedium currently stands between me and a cool row of houses. It all somehow manages to set my brain on fire in a good way, always managing to give me just enough to do to keep me going. There’s always a hilariously trivial little carrot on a stick to chase, and a quaint little inconvenience in between me and it. Task go brrrr.

And once I've pushed through, once I've built cliffs and moved houses and collected DIY recipes and bought furniture and dug up and reburied plants, I'm left with an island that feels set in place. Like quick-set cement. Precisely because it was such a pain in the ass to put together, and would be such a pain in the ass to take apart again… it makes it feel real. And god do the assets in this game look good. I was in my in-game house the other day, lights off, and I shut one of the curtains. There was still light in the room, so I shut the other curtain. Lights out. Then I opened it again. I realized that the game was simulating the moonlight coming through one window and not the other. I went into the first-person camera mode, and I stared at the spilled crisp packet item I had just obtained, lying there on the floor, in the moonlight, and a single tear gently slid its way down my cheek. This must be the place. 

Happy four years New Horizons, you son of a bitch. Here's to another four.