By Christian Metzger ‘20
Staff Writer
Nintendo
While the world remains in quarantine, many students at Lake Forest College are wondering what to do with their free time.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the solution. Available exclusively for Nintendo’s Switch handheld console, the premise for the game is deceptively simple – build a small community of various cute animal characters on a deserted island. Your days consist of gathering materials, bugs, fish, and just about anything you can get your hands on to create the town of your dreams as the duly elected Community Representative for your respective island.
As one might have guessed, New Horizons is not a complex game. Most of the time in the game is spent collecting items and using the game’s newly introduced mechanic to the series, DIY Recipes, to build furniture and a myriad of other objects to place around your town and the inside of your house. The number of objects and customization options is truly staggering, and the furniture ranges from a breadth of themes and cultures that are bound to make one’s inner interior decorator run wild.
The amount of customization options open to you is one aspect in which the game excels. In the beginning of the game, you are isolated to a small patch of your chosen island and have a small number of activities to do during a given day. Yet, as each day progresses new buildings and mechanics are unlocked. A week into the game, you have the full capacity to form every feature and move buildings around to your heart’s content.
New Horizons, like other games in the Animal Crossing series, runs on a real-world clock, meaning time in the game runs as it does in real life. While this makes the game very slow in the beginning, I find that it works extremely well for short bursts of gameplay. Popping in for a few minutes to do various activities is an option, and the ambient music and the vivid colors make the simple gameplay fall into an almost therapeutic loop.
One should never fret about running out of stuff to do with the addition of the ‘Nook Miles’ system. Named after the titular character in the game, this system awards you with ‘miles’ for doing various activities on the island. This ranges from anything as simple as taking pictures to selling fruit on trees, and these miles add up so you can purchase all sorts of useful in-game goodies.
For those who might be looking to play along with friends, the game supports up to eight players in visiting islands via local play or over the internet – allowing you to connect seamlessly with friends. With this feature, you can travel between towns and cooperatively help each other in building up your island however you like, or just watching general chaos ensue. An important note for potential buyers is that the game only allows for one island per Switch, so if you have multiple people looking to play the game on the same console, you will have to share an island together.
While Animal Crossing: New Horizons may not be for everyone, the draw of the game comes from the sheer fun of spending time looking over your island and doing chores, talking to the characters, and customizing every element on your island to your heart’s content. It serves as the perfect comforting distraction, especially during quarantine. Score: 8/10
