Sometimes it’s all at once, and this cheerful juxtaposition is one of Animal Crossing’s true pleasures. The process of building detailed doll’s houses for the villagers has the potential to be deeply calming, aesthetically pleasing … or deranged. Both are so pleased with their holiday homes they clap and cheer. Deirdre wants a slice of autumn, so I put up wallpaper that looks like the woods and little heaps of flaming leaves everywhere. He likes science and wears a little lab coat, so I made sure there were IV drips at every chair. Petri, one of the new villagers, asked me to make him a tea room. Together you build and design holiday homes for tourists – many, many tourists, each of whom has a specific set of ideas about the kind of holiday home they want. It is staffed by a manatee called Wardell, a grey langur monkey called Niko and a pink otter called Lottie, your boss. The premise is that, in addition to being your island’s resident representative, you have taken on a job offshore in a small, chirpy interior design startup. Happy Home Paradise is a whole different game.
Every morning, you can perform gentle stretching in the square with your villagers, your shameful 10-month disappearing act forgotten.Īll of this before we even get offshore, away from the gaze of Thomas Nook and on to a nearby peninsula that marks the start of the paid expansion, (£22.49, or free if you have signed up for the Switch Online Expansion Pass).
New Horizons has, with this new content, in effect tripled what you can do each day. There’s a farming and cooking component, too, meaning I have to fill in my enormous inland lake, thoughtfully decorated with dinosaur skeletons, to turn it into a sugar cane patch. Harv’s island, previously just a photo studio, is now also a tiny boutique market where the visiting merchants have set up shop permanently. Huge growth … Animal Crossing: New Horizons. There are, astonishingly, more than 9,000 new items in the game, of which the Gyroids make up merely a couple of hundred. The offshore trips offer a crucial new component of the update: the mining of wriggly little talismans called Gyroids. Not only can you explore these new spaces but you are taken there on a motorboat by Kapp’n, who will sing you a little song every time. Speaking of old friends, a personal favourite of mine, Kapp’n, is now offering boat tours to distant islands. Should you have his Amiibo card, Resetti – the furious mole who would call you names if you turned off your console without saving on the GameCube – will sit and drink an espresso as if nothing ever happened. You can invite other villagers in for coffee – even characters from Animal Crossing games of the past. The museum now has a coffee shop, The Roost, staffed by the initially stoic Brewster – who grows fond of you the more little coffees you drink with him.
But I have work to do, so I dust myself off, offer pumpkins and peaches to my villagers as a mea culpa, and get down to the business of throwing myself entirely into Animal Crossing New Horizons 2.0: Escape from Nook Island. My animals are furious, alienated or both. “I could swear I see Sarah in front of me.” Ice cold. “Well I guess I’ve finally lost my mind,” begins Gloria, the duck with the bob haircut. “You just kinda disappeared.” Sprinkles is happy to see me and angry that I’ve been gone all at once. All sorts to discover … Animal Crossing: New Horizons screenshot.