Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Wrote on Aug 2023 | Category: simulation

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This is a super cute game. I'm torn between rating this a 3 or 4 stars game (IMO). Because...It's SUPER CUTE. It's super relaxing. You (almost) never die. There's absolutely no rush to do anything. And you can do whatever you want! It's not like you have very specific missions to accomplish or anything. I mean, there is a list of things to do, but it's totally fine to procrastinate and not do them 😂

But before I continue, check out the trailer to get a better idea of the general feeling of this game 👇

Trailer

Review

So it's like actually very relaxing. However, I sometimes have no patience in games and I just want to finish doing my list of tasks. In this game, time passes just as in real life. If you're playing at 3am, it is 3am in the game. For example, there's a store that closes at 10pm. I had some issues with this because I only had time to play after 10pm for a few days, so I could never go to the store 🥹 which made it very frustrating for me.

As I was saying before, it's super cool and relaxing if you don't want to think and don't want to be in a hurry. You can just spend time doing your favorite activity, whichever that is: fishing, planting, redecorating, building, etc. The downside is that, for some of those activities, you do have kind of a limit. For example, you can hit the rocks and get minerals, but they come in a limited amount per day. So, once you've gotten all the minerals for the day, you're very much done for that activity.

Another cool thing that makes it a bit addictive is that the wildlife (fish or insects) changes depending on the time of the day or on the season. There will be some fish only available in winter, or some insects only available in spring. Some butterflies that only appear in the morning, and so on. So, you kind of want to try to play at different times of the day or in different months to collect more wildlife.

Of course, this can become frustrating at some point. Especially if you're like me that obsess over a video game for only a period of time and then gets over it. Which is what happened to me. At first, I'd play this game for 1-2 hours every day to get as much done as possible, until there was a time limit to wait for something (like a house to finish being built). But I was ready to play the next day. At some point, this was not true. Because I just wanted to play for hours but I couldn't cause I had hit my time limit of things I wanted to do for the day. Which was a bummer.

The other downside I found is that it takes a LOT of playtime to start having the ability to do more customization for your island. For example, to be able to create roads or move houses around. I'm sure it gets more fun when you can spend more money or have more customization options, but I don't feel I got there with the time I played it.

By this point, I don't feel like playing it anymore. It is for sure fun and relaxing, but I feel a bit frustrated now because the things I want to do take more time, which I don't want to spend.

I'm sure it's way more fun for people that like to have this kind of 'unlimited' play - where the game never really ends. But I realized I prefer to have specific goals to reach and when I'm done with those, I'm done with the game. Because of this, I'm giving it a 3/5 rating.

Rating

3/5

tl;dr

• Super cute and relaxing.

• Time passes as in real life.

• Bunch of activities to choose from, but a daily limit of things to do.

• There is a list of tasks, but you don't have to do them to be able to play.

• 'Unlimited' play - the game never really ends.