As the coronavirus continues to spread, many people will have to spend more time at home than they ever imagined. For some UW students, this means hours of video games every day. This week saw the release of what might be the most anticipated release of 2020 – Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the Nintendo Switch.
New Horizons is the newest entry in the long-running Animal Crossing franchise, which is a genre of game that defies easy description. There are not any enemies or checkpoints to clear; instead, most of the game will have players be catching bugs and fish and selling them to a raccoon. There’s no pressure to do anything. Early on, players incur a large debt to the previously mentioned raccoon but players can pay it off any time they like. Simply put, it is a game about nothing. It is also the best game of 2020 so far.
The core Animal Crossing gameplay loop is one of the most soothing to have ever been committed to a cartridge. You can easily lose hours catching fish, cutting down trees, and talking to villagers. The game is in real-time, and some kinds of fish and bugs only come out at certain hours of the day, making it a perfect game to put down and return to whenever the mood strikes you. There’s no levels or timed challenges, so play sessions can be as long or as short as you want. All of this makes New Horizons the perfect coronavirus quarantine game.
Some people will tell you that games are at their best when they are stressful, that the harder the game is, the better. These people are wrong. The quality of a game is a direct result of how fun it is to play. Animal Crossing: New Horizons is very fun to play. It is not hard at all. Some of the game actions require some dexterity, but a five-year-old could do them without a problem. The joy of this game is not in its complex mechanics but in spending time in its peaceful and tranquil world.
Some people like to hear about graphics in a game review. This is a game about talking animals that give each other end tables as a gift; it does not need top-of-the-line ray tracing or lighting engines. It does look much nicer than the last Animal Crossing game, but at this point, games do not really need to make an effort to look better than a 3DS game. In regards to graphics, there is one note: how fluffy the animals look in this game. It looks like if you tried to touch one of the villagers that your hand would sink in a bit.
There are flaws to be found if you look hard enough. The slow-paced nature of the game is a problem sometimes – it is not uncommon to run out of things to do at the end of the day. Many people struggle to play games like these for longer for two weeks after they feel that they’ve seen everything the game has to see. I am only five days into the game; I do not know if I will still be playing it in two weeks. Maybe I will not have anything else better to do. I know that the last time I played an Animal Crossing game, I stopped playing after a month, but the last time I played an Animal Crossing game, I was a freshman in high school.
Some people like to call games like New Horizons “baby games”. It’s true that the game’s characters look like the rejects for a PBS Kids casting call, and the gameplay is so easy that it feels like a waste of an adult’s fine motor skills to do it, but the label is not valid. Paradoxically, these games take the sort of dedication and patience most kids lack. These games aren’t meant for kids. Adults know that now more than ever, the world is complex, stressful and scary, and sometimes you just want to catch a fish.
