Quick Review of Animal Crossing (New Horizon)

Critical Play: the hottest social sandbox game in 2020

About Animal Crossing — New Horizon

Animal Crossing is a social sandbox game. It is developed by Nintendo and created by Katsuya Eguchi and Hisashi Nogami. It can be played on Nintendo Switch. According to Nintendo, this game has huge population of adult women between the ages of 19 to 24, which contributed greatly to its success.

The idea of the game is simple. A human moves to an island, and set up the house in the village there. There will be various activities like fishing and growing fruits, and with these activities, you can be exchanging goods, making money, expanding your house and making your island a wonderful place to live, and...show off.

Mortgage & Market Economy Simulation

I thought one of the most interesting aspects of Animal Crossing is that it humorously mimics how the actual mortgage world works. Paying off mortgage is one of the most fundamental objective in the game. Mortgages are the number of Bells you owe Tom Nook for building and expanding your house. You will be persuaded into continually expanding and upgrading your property, which leads you to paying higher and higher mortgages, and requires you to do more activities and stay in the game longer. This is just like the real world where you are trapped for many years paying off loans and debts you have once you purchase a property.

There is fluctuating market economy in the game, just like the real world, where prices of goods change constantly. You can trade “stocks” or trade over the counter. There might be inflation. Certain goods might be more available than others. Each island has its own specialty food that’s locally produced, and therefore can charge a different price. All these economic related resources makes the game very real while creating many surprises.Things always change and the only way to keep up is by staying in the game longer.

Why This Game Isn’t For Me (right now)

Though this is such a well-received and popular game in 2020, I find myself not having the drive to continue playing after starting the game for a few hours.

The on-boarding experience is too long, and the tasks are repetitive. After I landed on my island, I had to collect bunch of woods and do many simple tasks to get up to speed.

One of the reasons I started playing this game is friend invitation. Ideally, visiting friend’s island would be one of the first things I want to do, but it is not allowing me until after I finish bunch of jarring setup tasks. This caused me to abandon the game before being able to travel.

In the meantime, there isn’t a strong storyline while having a long on-boarding process. From early on, I knew that as long as I spend enough time on the island, I would get all types of things I need. If there were some small storyline, for example, a quest, or a mystery I need to uncover, I would have stayed, which would lead to me spending way more time than I did. But since there isn’t, I feel daunted by the huge commitment and decided not to continue playing.

If I were to improve the game, I would either add some mysterious quests at the beginning, allow starting the game from a friend’s island, or just make the on-boarding process go faster!

Type of Fun & My Recommendation

Animal Crossing brings you relaxation & excitement. If you have a lot of free time, and want to chill and kill time after a long day of work, this is a great game for you. The game has strong discovery and expression aesthetics. There are no intense challenges, but many mini tasks like cooking and catching fish, and you get to express yourselves in clothing, house decoration, planting and more. You can take a poop, grow money in trees, grow hybrid flowers…

And it is also really big on fellowship! In the time of COVID, you can hangout with friends by playing Animal Crossings together. You can visit each other’s islands, trade food, and chill by the beach. There’s so much to do with friends in the game. What a nice getaway from Zoom meetings！