Game Review: Animal Crossing New Horizons

It’s hard to believe 2020 was 4 years ago at the time of writing this.  The year unlike any other, where Covid-19 had spread like wildfire and the whole world had essentially shut down and we all were forced to lock ourselves away.  As life as we knew it became confined to the walls of our houses, it made sense we all yearned for an escape; for a means to venture out into anything but the strange reality we found ourselves in.  By nothing but simple coincidence, Nintendo was able to give people the perfect opportunity to emulate that escape with the release of Animal Crossing New Horizons on the Nintendo Switch.

Released on March 20^th 2020, Animal Crossing New Horizons was the latest iteration of the long-running life simulation series developed and published by Nintendo.  Originally releasing on the Nintendo 64 in Japan as Animal Forest, the series soon came to the Western world when it was ported and packaged as Animal Crossing for the Nintendo Gamecube.  Since then, the series has had entries across most of Nintendo’s major platforms including Nintendo DS, Nintendo WII, Nintendo 3DS and Nintendo Switch.  As mentioned just above, the timing of New Horizons release could not have been any better, with the Covid-19 lockdowns, everyone was stuck in their homes looking for someway to pass the time; and a cozy little life simulation game was the perfect answer. I still remember hearing how Nintendo Switches were selling out fast in the wake of the pandemic and scalpers were beginning to sell them at higher costs just because people wanted one to play New Horizons.  As of June 30^th 2024, New Horizons has sold a total of 45.85 million copies. To put that into perspective, that is more than the entirety of the prior games in the series combined.

There’s no conventional narrative in Animal Crossing New Horizons, like with many of the prior games in the series, the game is mostly setup to allow the player to immerse themselves in the life simulation aspects of the game. In the case of New Horizons, you are invited by everyone’s favourite Tanuki, Tom Nook to take part in one of his Island Getaway Packages.  These packages allow you the chance to fly to a deserted island and build a thriving island community with other anthropomorphic animals.  After you land, you’ll spend the first few weeks taming the wild nature of the island before the island becomes more inhabited.  Your end goal then is to get a 3-star rating for the island from its residents, in hopes of attracting famous singer K.K Slider to come and do a performance on the island.  

That’s the crux of the story behind New Horizons, but again it’s only a setup, the story in a lot of ways is what you make of it. As a life simulation you can give as much time as you like to your island and you get to decide what your day-to-day activities look like.  You can spend the day digging up fossils, fishing or diving for rare fish, chatting and helping your fellow island villagers, or reconstructing and designing the island. The flexibility and freedom to do as you like in the game has always been the biggest attractor for many people with Animal Crossing, me included. I do feel however the narrative element feels a bit of a wasted opportunity, as after KK Slider arrives, the core idea of building your island is left to you and the game doesn’t really give you any further impression.  I don’t typically like being comparative, but in New Leaf, the idea was you were the mayor and you were building a bustling town over the course of your tenure there.  You saw in real time as the town become livelier, more shops would open, existing shops would expand, etc. In New Horizons, everything kind of just stops after a certain point and it halts that sense of life and development the other games were able to establish quite easily.

What is here though, fits the mold of a solid and enjoyable Animal Crossing experience.  There are more options when it comes to customizing your player character, including skin tone, eye color, hair and non-binary friendly options too.  It’s nice that the series evolved past the odd question system from prior games when it came to designing your character.  You are free to explore your island to your hearts content, you’ll have an array of tools at your disposal for digging up things, cutting down trees, fishing for fish, catching bugs and navigating the wild landscape.  There’s a nice simplicity to the tool functionality in this game. Though a small complaint I will note is Golden tools will no longer be unbreakable as they were in prior games, forcing you to continuously craft new tools with the games big feature, crafting and customization. The whole idea is you are on a deserted island, so you need to use the natural resources of the island to build up.  Whether that’s tools, furniture, outdoor decoration, clothing, New Horizons invites the player to learn recipes, gather materials and craft it all yourself. It’s an ingenious idea as it gives the player more control over what they want to have on their island and gives them a more engaging way to produce it. 

That sense of development crafting can provide is not solely based on items you can make, but also in the actual landscape of your island.  Once you reach a certain point in the game, you’ll unlock the ability to terraform your island to your hearts content.  You can knock down and build up cliffs, create rivers or waterfalls and literally build bridges and inclines.  The level of control this feature gives you allows you to design your island to your hearts content down to the most meticulous detail.  It’s not deployed in the easiest of ways as it does involve working tile after tile, I’d have much preferred a more time-friendly way to do this sort of customization. In general construction and crafting while great in a general sense, fails to respect the players time as it doesn’t offer a means of creating items in bulk or pulling resources from storage as apposed to your inventory.  It’s not a major deal breaker but it does make the process more tedious than it needs to be.

When it comes to actual island living, the game produces no failures in this department however. The villagers you will come to live alongside all have unique personalities and traits to make interacting with them a memorable experience.  There’s a great variety of villagers to invite to your island as well, the game touts an impressive library of 413 villagers all of different animal races and personalities. With over 10 villager spots on your island up for grabs, it makes filling these spots as easy or as hard as you want it to be depending on the kind of villagers you want on the island.  As the game runs in real-time too, the time of day plays into a lot of things like the fish or bugs you can find or when you access certain stores.  It teaches the player to treat the game with a notable sense of patience as you will need to come back to it day after day to progress and develop your island and relationships.  How much this gameplay approach will sync with you depends on your own level of patience; after sinking well over 800 hours into it back in the day, I decided a month was a suitable period to explore everything the game had to offer.

From a visual end, you can really feel New Horizons take advantage of the Switch hardware to deliver the best looking Animal Crossing game to date.  Colours are vibrant and the environment shines in any time of day.  I also love how much detail is put into decorative items and furniture, you can really feel the scope of your décor when it has such intrinsic design to it.  As is the case with every Animal Crossing game, the musical score also helps this game along wonderfully.  Kazumi Totaka, Yasuaki Iwata, Yumi Takahashi, Shinobu Nagata, Sayako Doi and Masato Ohashi all worked together to compose the games amazing main theme along with its hourly soundtrack and variations.  My favourite track is a toss up between 5AM, 6PM, Bunny Day and Ceremony.

After spending a nice bit of time re-experiencing the world of Animal Crossing New Horizons, I am reminded of why this game meant so much to me and so many others.  At a time where connection and exploration was not permitted, New Horizons offered so many people an outlet to join together and build.  It’s entire design and concept helped people come together and build their own idyllic environments with little to no detractors.  After all this time however, I am not blind to it’s notable inconsistencies. I think it does lose some of the Animal Crossing charm by focusing too much on its creative functionality but I get that it’s not a deal breaker for a lot of people.  I still think what’s here is more than enough to last anyone with an entire year’s worth of seasonal content. New Horizons was at the perfect place at the perfect time, and for what it allowed me and many people to do in a time of great struggle, it deserves all the praise I can give it.