One of the things you don't see with Animal Crossing: New Horizons or any Animal Crossing title is critical reviews that explain why the games are the way they are. In recent years I have begun to see a shift in the way people think about game reviews and the shift from explaining why a game is good into why a game is alright but not what could be. Here I want to do the same and explain why Animal Crossing: New Horizons is not the title I think it could be.
To preface this review, I want to say that I do not think New Horizons is a bad game, far from it. It matches a lot of what you want about these games that never end, there's a comfortable atmosphere, plenty to do and so much content that truly completing the game is effectively impossible. Music sets a welcoming atmosphere in Animal Crossing and listening to those tunes on a warm summer night or a chilly winter morning is one of the best things that comes with Animal Crossing. Beautiful vistas, the cuddly characters, the feeling of freedom as you explore your tropical paradise, and the limitless amount of furniture and clothing you can create make the game feel very personal. New Horizons nails what Animal Crossing always has, the aura of a calm, quiet town.
However, with that atmosphere, I rarely see anyone bring up why the quiet town feeling does not work. As we reach the game's 1 year anniversary, I see more and more people saying that they feel burnt out by the game. People who spent hours with the game will say they just dropped it one day and never felt the need to pick it back up. I wondered why that was as I continued playing and as I neared my 30th hour with the game, I discovered why. Beyond getting K.K. Slider, there is nothing to do with the game, and I mean that. Once you acquire a 3-star rating for your island, which is not hard at all, it's mostly just acquired through waiting, the game is pretty much done. But once I reached that milestone, I realized something; the game was going to make me wait a whole day just to see the end of the game. Suddenly, everything hit me on why this game does not work. You have to play the way developers intended, with no true freedom to do anything on your own. Do you want to buy into the Stalk Market? You have to wait until Sunday, and there's only a 7 hour period where you can do it. Do you want to do anything beyond your daily chores on your small landmass to gain money, looks like the only thing you can do is fish because you have to wait three days for your trees to grow fruit and a day until your rocks produce resources and shells wash up on your shores. Do you want to explore another landmass to get resources that are not native to your island? I hope you know another player with different resources because you are fresh out of luck finding that in a single-player experience. Do you want to build any kind of building that is not just another house for a villager to live in? Too bad, your focus should be on the museum and infrastructure, you don't get to choose what's on your island. The game has so many places where it falls completely flat in keeping you coming back. If you do not like the way the game has laid things out already for you, you do not get to pick your own way to do things like Minecraft or Terraria. You must do things the way developers intended with no variation on how to play. You don't get to make your own experience, or even pick which villagers you get, without some major caveat.
Sticking with the theme of developer-enforced fun, how about time traveling as an example. Why do people time travel in Animal Crossing? Because they want to cheat, right? Now answer me this, why do people want to cheat? To create their own experiences. When someone punches a cheat code into Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas or plugs a GameShark into their copy of Pokemon: FireRed, they are doing this because they want to create their own new experiences. Whether it's to give themselves a bunch of items they never got or collect every collectible in the game to see how the game responds, it's always fun to mess around with these kinds of things. But time-traveling is very different because it does not create a new experience that cannot be seen otherwise like a moon jump cheat, it just allows someone to experience the game without having the downside of waiting. It allows someone to skip ahead and continue to play the game when the game will not let them anymore. Imagine that Super Mario Odyssey forced you to stop collecting moons at a certain time. Say that you could only collect them from the hours of 8 am to 5 pm. Would it be wrong for a player to want to play the game after 5 pm by moving their Switch's clock ahead and playing that way? When developers put inherent limits in their game that force the player to stop playing, is it wrong for that player to wish to continue playing and doing so through the means of cheating. In my opinion, that is an inherent game design flaw. Now obviously that doesn't mean that I think fruits should immediately grow back. A way to remedy this would be with a significantly larger, perhaps infinite open world to explore and grab resources from. Run out of fruits in your small area, venture South and you find trees everywhere, or explore Westward and find mountains filled with rocks to mine. Is it really that hard to give that kind of freedom to the player so they can play how they want to?
All in all, despite my consistent bickering over the game, I did enjoy my time with it. Like I said at the top of the review, it's not that this game is bad, I just wish it had more to keep me engaged and playing for hours one day while allowing me to play the way the developers intended for only an hour on another day. This game has me eagerly awaiting more content and hopefully, a sequel will develop on the great base built here in this best-seller.
To preface this review, I want to say that I do not think New Horizons is a bad game, far from it. It matches a lot of what you want about these games that never end, there's a comfortable atmosphere, plenty to do and so much content that truly completing the game is effectively impossible. Music sets a welcoming atmosphere in Animal Crossing and listening to those tunes on a warm summer night or a chilly winter morning is one of the best things that comes with Animal Crossing. Beautiful vistas, the cuddly characters, the feeling of freedom as you explore your tropical paradise, and the limitless amount of furniture and clothing you can create make the game feel very personal. New Horizons nails what Animal Crossing always has, the aura of a calm, quiet town.
However, with that atmosphere, I rarely see anyone bring up why the quiet town feeling does not work. As we reach the game's 1 year anniversary, I see more and more people saying that they feel burnt out by the game. People who spent hours with the game will say they just dropped it one day and never felt the need to pick it back up. I wondered why that was as I continued playing and as I neared my 30th hour with the game, I discovered why. Beyond getting K.K. Slider, there is nothing to do with the game, and I mean that. Once you acquire a 3-star rating for your island, which is not hard at all, it's mostly just acquired through waiting, the game is pretty much done. But once I reached that milestone, I realized something; the game was going to make me wait a whole day just to see the end of the game. Suddenly, everything hit me on why this game does not work. You have to play the way developers intended, with no true freedom to do anything on your own. Do you want to buy into the Stalk Market? You have to wait until Sunday, and there's only a 7 hour period where you can do it. Do you want to do anything beyond your daily chores on your small landmass to gain money, looks like the only thing you can do is fish because you have to wait three days for your trees to grow fruit and a day until your rocks produce resources and shells wash up on your shores. Do you want to explore another landmass to get resources that are not native to your island? I hope you know another player with different resources because you are fresh out of luck finding that in a single-player experience. Do you want to build any kind of building that is not just another house for a villager to live in? Too bad, your focus should be on the museum and infrastructure, you don't get to choose what's on your island. The game has so many places where it falls completely flat in keeping you coming back. If you do not like the way the game has laid things out already for you, you do not get to pick your own way to do things like Minecraft or Terraria. You must do things the way developers intended with no variation on how to play. You don't get to make your own experience, or even pick which villagers you get, without some major caveat.
Sticking with the theme of developer-enforced fun, how about time traveling as an example. Why do people time travel in Animal Crossing? Because they want to cheat, right? Now answer me this, why do people want to cheat? To create their own experiences. When someone punches a cheat code into Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas or plugs a GameShark into their copy of Pokemon: FireRed, they are doing this because they want to create their own new experiences. Whether it's to give themselves a bunch of items they never got or collect every collectible in the game to see how the game responds, it's always fun to mess around with these kinds of things. But time-traveling is very different because it does not create a new experience that cannot be seen otherwise like a moon jump cheat, it just allows someone to experience the game without having the downside of waiting. It allows someone to skip ahead and continue to play the game when the game will not let them anymore. Imagine that Super Mario Odyssey forced you to stop collecting moons at a certain time. Say that you could only collect them from the hours of 8 am to 5 pm. Would it be wrong for a player to want to play the game after 5 pm by moving their Switch's clock ahead and playing that way? When developers put inherent limits in their game that force the player to stop playing, is it wrong for that player to wish to continue playing and doing so through the means of cheating. In my opinion, that is an inherent game design flaw. Now obviously that doesn't mean that I think fruits should immediately grow back. A way to remedy this would be with a significantly larger, perhaps infinite open world to explore and grab resources from. Run out of fruits in your small area, venture South and you find trees everywhere, or explore Westward and find mountains filled with rocks to mine. Is it really that hard to give that kind of freedom to the player so they can play how they want to?
All in all, despite my consistent bickering over the game, I did enjoy my time with it. Like I said at the top of the review, it's not that this game is bad, I just wish it had more to keep me engaged and playing for hours one day while allowing me to play the way the developers intended for only an hour on another day. This game has me eagerly awaiting more content and hopefully, a sequel will develop on the great base built here in this best-seller.