An­i­mal Cross­ing: New Hori­zons

MISHAWAKA – The pop­u­lar an­i­mal-themed life sim­u­la­tor game has fi­nally ar­rived on store shelves and is ready for play­ers to jump right in. 

First and fore­most, I would like to make it per­fectly ob­vi­ous that I is­sued a shame­ful and de­hu­man­iz­ing squeal upon my re­trieval of the game. Af­ter ter­ri­fy­ing every­one in the im­me­di­ate vicin­ity, i.e. my dad, the poor guy dri­ving me home from GameStop, I tore into the case of the game like a ra­bid an­i­mal and threw the car­tridge into the game slot on my Switch. 

Upon boot­ing the game, I was greeted with a lovely vi­sual of the Nook Inc. logo, the com­pany in the game that is gen­er­ous enough to give you an “all-ex­pense paid” trip to a de­serted is­land that they own. The clerks, Timmy and Tommy Nook, rel­a­tives of the busi­ness owner and per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of greed, Tom Nook, in­tro­duced them­selves and started prepar­ing every­thing for my trip to the is­land. By “prepar­ing,” I mean let­ting me cus­tomize my char­ac­ter and the gen­eral lay­out of my is­land. 

Af­ter a rig­or­ous ques­tion­naire about my pref­er­ences of hemi­sphere res­i­dence, one of the boys asked the ques­tion, “What one thing would you bring to a de­serted is­land?” He then re­al­ized that that ques­tion was in very poor taste and clar­i­fied that it was only a hy­po­thet­i­cal. How­ever, had I replied “Money,” I’ve no doubt their em­ployer would’ve stuffed me into the plane then and there and robbed me once we were far enough from civ­i­liza­tion. 

Fi­nally, how­ever, I was clear of all the pleas­antries and al­lowed to set foot on my own is­land with my two neigh­bors and gra­cious hosts. As the term “de­serted” im­plies, all of us were rather light on ma­te­ri­als and mod­ern ameni­ties, so our first goal was to clear out a cen­tral plaza, gather fire­wood and food, and have a party to cel­e­brate our mak­ing it safely to the is­land. I was un­der the im­pres­sion that get­ting to the is­land would be the least haz­ardous part, but per­haps Tom Nook val­ued Hawai­ian shirts over stan­dard plane safety pro­ce­dures. Have you seen his out­fit? There’s no ques­tion where my – I mean, his money is go­ing. 

Cel­e­brat­ing was be­ing com­mis­sioned a cel­e­bra­tory bev­er­age and my tent and cot for the night; I re­tired to my mea­gre abode. Morn­ing came with Tom Nook ap­pear­ing at my front stoop, ready to de­liver the news that any happy trav­eler wants to hear past the point of no re­turn on their cruise. The “all-ex­penses paid” part came with one caveat: I paid all the ex­penses. Get­ting hit with a 45,000-bell bill on day one only 45 sec­onds af­ter wak­ing up is, be­lieve it or not, the sec­ond worst morn­ing I’ve ever had. Bells are the An­i­mal Cross­ing cur­rency; the ex­change rate is 661.76 bells to one U.S. dol­lar.  

Now, a $68 flight to a de­serted is­land with room and board in­cluded does­n’t sound ter­ri­ble, but when you re­al­ize the only way to earn money here is sell­ing bugs, fish, and what­ever else you can scrounge, and each of those things nets you half a dol­lar at best, the of­fer loses its ap­peal. Es­pe­cially when “no” is­n’t an op­tion. I per­se­vered, though, and I was able to pay my bill off with Tom Nook’s Nook Miles, an al­ter­nate form of cur­rency de­vel­oped by the furry fiend, him­self. Miles can be earned by com­plet­ing var­i­ous tasks around the is­land. The bill in Nook Miles comes out to about 5,000 miles, and most of the re­wards come in 100 – 200 Nook Mile in­cre­ments. The up­shot is that Nook Miles are the op­ti­mal way to pay your bill. Once the debt is paid, Tom Nook makes fun of you for liv­ing in the tent he gave you, but 2 hours ago, and not-so-sub­tly pushes you to­wards buy­ing a house. You agree to the terms, be­cause it’s re­ally the only way to progress, and Nook gives you a home of your own, with twice the price of the pre­vi­ous tab. 

This is the por­tion of the game where I cur­rently find my­self. Scroung­ing for any kind of fauna and shak­ing every limb loose from any tree I can reach only brings me so many bells. I’m not the type to take a chal­lenge so lightly, though. It was at this point I buck­led down and com­pletely de­stroyed the nat­ural ecosys­tem of my new home, which was do­ing fine a few short hours ago. But­ter­flies, carp, loaches, bee­tles, crabs, and, for some rea­son that only the two-faced tanuki tyrant knows, tires were plucked, ad nau­seum, from their nat­ural habi­tats and slung at high speed into the fledg­ling de­part­ment store for min­i­mum profit, un­til I had col­lected 100,000 bells. Ten hours of slum­ming it as a bud­get Bear Grylls to pay my home loan off later, I ended the first day with nary a worry, save for the psy­cho­log­i­cal hor­ror Nook would in­flict on me the fol­low­ing morn­ing. 

For all the guff that I give it, I thor­oughly en­joyed my first ex­pe­ri­ence with An­i­mal Cross­ing: New Hori­zons. The game is every­thing I ex­pected it to be, with plenty more in store, es­pe­cially con­sid­er­ing I’ve put less than a day into it. With all the free time I now have on my hands, due to be­ing heav­ily ad­vised to stay in­doors, which I’ll take this op­por­tu­nity to re­mind you I would have done any­ways, I will cer­tainly be sink­ing nu­mer­ous hours into this lovely, fam­ily-friendly, sim­u­la­tion game with heavy cap­i­tal­ist themes.