I have a problem. My mornings are not begun by the exercise my knees desperately need, nor do I eat anything with any sort of nutritional value. The first thing I do when I wake up each morning, face barely a shape, is to visit my Animal Crossing: New Horizons island.
This has been going on pretty much every single day since the game came out, a tranquil routine where I don’t wake up and fret about The Event we are all currently in. Instead, my early mornings are spent finding shells and earning Bells, and also wishing that Miranda would move away.
However, as someone who often doesn’t deal well with clunkiness in games, it’s even more surprising that I am so addicted to New Horizons despite it having plenty of leftover clunk from its earliest days. Animal Crossing has always done things its own way, often to the inconvenience of the player.
Take, for instance, buying something. Just buying something can feel like listening to a sonnet at times, Timmy or Tammy reeling off the same spiel each and every time you want to look at what disgusting flooring they have to sell. Worse still, you can’t select a specific amount of something you want apart from the few that are available in either bundles of 1 or 5. If I want six diplomas to hang on my walls, why make it so difficult? Are you the board of education, Timmy or Tammy?
Even the special vendors have no sense of self-awareness, them telling you about how they found a dead body in the woods when they were a child each and every time. Listen, Saharah, I just want to buy some rugs, I get what your purpose in life is at this point, you don’t need to keep telling me.
The same goes for the dodos at the airport, who, while positively adorable, surely don’t need to go to DEFCON-1 every time and completely lock the game down whenever you visit or leave an island, or someone visits yours. Trying to travel to and from islands in New Horizons is like that Austin Powers scene with the slowly moving steamroller, just even more long-winded.
Above anyone else, though, who takes the absolute piss the most is Blathers, him playing some kind of sick game every time you just want him to look at something. The mental chess he requires of you to assess fossils before donating them is pure misanthropy, which is made worse when you have multiple things to look at. I guess it must get lonely for him in that big museum of his, but he really doesn’t need to fill the grandparent role of repeating himself over and over again.
Yet more awkwardness arrives when you just want to place some items down outside, or even pick something up without accidentally picking the flowers; something I have done a million times by now. You need to be in a very particular spot sometimes, the lack of pinpoint movement with the Switch’s Joy-Cons and Pro Controller not exactly helping. My non-gamer partner loves the game, though fishing is a sore spot for her as by the time she has properly lined up her character, the fish has already buggered off.
When you get to the terraforming, that’s when New Horizons really comes alive, you able to shape your island as you see fit. It’s a wonderful addition, but yet another that needs smoothing out. Having to go one tile at a time is pain-staking, especially because of the aforementioned controls, as is trying to cultivate land due to the pixel-perfection required to put your character in the exact spot required. I wish there was the option to choose multiple tiles, or even just to hold down A so you can continuously customise.
I guess it speaks volumes for how wonderful New Horizons is overall that all of these nuisances haven’t stopped me from sinking 120 hours into it. It’s one of the most uniquely beautiful games I have ever played and will likely continue to play as I amass a small army of snapping turtles. I just wish it wasn’t so unique sometimes.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is available now exclusively for the Nintendo Switch.
MORE NEW HORIZONS:
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– Animal Crossing: New Horizons Becomes 10x The Game With Eyebrows
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