For most of my life, Animal Crossing was a tiny and indescribable world made just for me. It was reserved for the turquoise Nintendo DS original that I got for my eighth birthday, the now-clunky-feeling device that hosted a sticky and peeling Nintendogs decal across the front and served me throughout my childhood. Playing Animal Crossing: Wild World on that thing was a daily routine during my heaviest DS-playing years, and I was always astonished at how deeply I cared about my weird, anthropomorphic digital town.
Animal Crossing is a social simulation game where you, as a human character, live on an island full of animals. It’s intensely open-ended, with no core objectives aside from building your world exactly how you want it. You do things like hunt bugs, catch fish, dig up fossils, earn money (“Bells”), customize your house, and socialize with others, all to the real-time pace of the calendar year. There’s even a fluctuating economy, including a stalk market, a high-risk high-reward way to get rich by buying and selling turnips.
That’s why it’s no surprise that New Horizons has taken over the world. After creating versions for GameCube, DS, Wii, 3DS, WiiU, and mobile devices, Nintendo released the newest for the Switch on March 20, and it’s widely agreed to be the best yet, and not just because of its newness or the desperate boredom of people in quarantine. I only recently secured a Switch Lite (frequently out of stock), but after just days of playing New Horizons, it’s obvious that it tops all of its predecessors. It’s hard to imagine a game having a better foundation on which to build, with nearly two decades of success stories behind it.
