Animal Crossing: New Horizons is celebrating its 5-year anniversary today, March 20, 2025.
There is a sense of distance between you and the town’s various inhabitants.
They lived here before you.
These friction-filled touches give these games a unique texture, even in the now-crowded “cozy” genre.
Its coincidental release at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic made the game a cultural and critical powerhouse.
But years later, it’s hard not to characterize New Horizons as a disappointment.
In part, this is the result of a difference in theming.
Unlike every game prior to it, New Horizons positions the player as a settler on an uncharted island.
To start, you are the island’s resident representative, chosen to be the villages primary decision maker.
You build out the town and pick more of its populace as you go.
With every new building, you choose its location on the island.
you might freely place furniture items out in the world (more on this later).
With these systems, you’re free to structure the town to maximize efficiency.
Eventually, you gain terraforming tools to mold the island’s layout completely to your whims.
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You couldn’t just buy a bridge and plop it down where you kindly.
This waiting made Animal Crossing feel a little more like building a life, however miniature and exaggerated.
To be fair, it takes lots of days for all of New Horizons' features to show themselves.
But New Horizons introduces each of its features in a steady drip, with announcements and clear goals.
The NookPhone turns the game’s free-flowing tasks into a pre-made checklist.
The progression is slow and not out in the open.
It will not show itself to you without input.
Similarly, projects like bridges and new shops require money and time.
This extends to your relationship with Animal Crossing’s titular NPCs.
The animals in the original game can be jerks.
In short, the inhabitants of Animal Crossing’s towns are not invested in you by default.
You have to prove yourself to them before they will express affection and care.
This is far from a complex relationship model, but it does have an arc to it.
But importantly, that arc lacks many of the regular video game signifiers.
There is no way to assess your relationship to any villager, except by how they talk to you.
Under the hood, Animal Crossing is crunching numbers just like any other video game.
But on the surface, there is just the fuzzy interactions of neighbors.
The emotional arc of New Horizons feels different, because you are the community to start.
Nothing existed before you arrived and thereby there are no pre-existing social structures to acclimate to.
In the games prior to New Leaf, villagers will move out without player input.
Little is left out of your hands.
The Animal Crossing games, especially the original incarnations but up to New Leaf, emphasize daily tasks.
You play these games in short spurts–sometimes more, sometimes less.
New Horizons maintains a lot of that structure.
In its original incarnation, Animal Crossing was a game that respected your time, even that valued brevity.
Yet, I am hoping against hope that Nintendo takes the franchise back to its more intimate roots.
I appreciate many of the quality-of-life changes that New Horizons brings and value especially its robust character creator.
It turns out that it is lonely to be the only one making the rules.
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