And while I’ve enjoyed small, short-lived bursts of joy-a new fish species, a gift dropped from a balloon!-in the end, Animal Crossing has only felt like the grind, charmingly reskinned. How is it possible to feel so completely unrelaxed in Animal Crossing? I’ve wondered this for hours, pitching my brain against the game’s repetitive dialog, frustrating mechanics, and obsession with debt bondage in search for a lasting dopamine high.
I sit out in the sun, getting more and more intoxicated, but nothing stops the stinging, and the bill just keeps getting steeper. Invisible bowling bumpers line each one.Īnd yet Animal Crossing: New Horizons is relaxing to me the way a high-end Maui resort may be relaxing-the kind where at-attention employees taxi $20 cocktails to your stinging-hot metal beach chair atop 500 truckloads of stolen white sand. There are no threats, except a couple of choice insects, and I can’t even fall off a hillside. I can dye my hair pink and lay a picnic basket along the river’s edge. I can fish on the seaside or chase a blue butterfly. It has the telltale signs: chibi animals talking in high-pitched mumblesqueaks, a lazy island guitar soundtrack, flowers literally everywhere. Widely lauded- including by WIRED-as the perfect pastime for this quarantine moment, Animal Crossing: New Horizons must mean to be relaxing. The host of a Netflix gardening show might issue a begrudging nod toward my patchy garden before they trip on a half-buried tire on their way out and stumble into a bramble of unpruned weeds. My landscaping looks like the set of Holes. My house in Animal Crossing: New Horizons looks like the “guys really live in apartments like this” meme.