I despise this game with all my heart. Never have I seen game design this morally corrupt, this worthless in creating fun interactions for the player. The entire game is one huge, joyless grind, designed to make playing it a habit, to make booting it up every three hours an addiction. It features three different subscription models, on top of lootboxes, on top of the metric ton of microtransactions. But I think ‘micro’ is the wrong word here, so let me phrase it another way: 'Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp' hides an excessive amount of content behind paywalls. What isn’t hidden is the daily grind to make you, the player, addicted. What is hidden is the fun cosmetics and furniture – The possibility of customizing your clothing, your campsite in a fun way. But doing that is expensive. Playing Pocket Camp is expensive in general, it feeds on your time and produces emptiness, with the promise of less emptiness if you just buy into it. If you just buy into it, it honors you, tells you you did amazing – ‘Welcome to the Pocket Camp Club’ it says jubilantly – and creates, as a reward, more emptiness for you to enjoy.

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is what happens when rip out the joyous heart of a beloved series and replace it with greed. Instead of giving something to the player, this game just takes. And keeps on taking. It took a lot of money from me. It took a lot of my time. And, in the end, I filled the emptiness it gave me with disgust. For all the abusive gameplay loops. For the morally bankrupt monetization. Please, do not play this game. And if you currently are, I beg of you, step away. Remember the sunk cost fallacy. You are worth way more than what his game considers you to be.