[Game Review] Inside

Playdead took six years to follow up their instant classic and influential Limbo.  Inside quickly found itself among heavy hitters populating "most anticipated" lists for the intervening years between announcement and release, not horribly uncommon for an indie title, but notable nonetheless.  Six years isn't totally out of the question for a followup from an indie studio looking to followup their breakout success (look at the eight years it took for Jonathan Blow to release his contentious followup to Braid, The Witness), but the indie landscape had a severe shift since that original release.  For one, the cinematic platformer and the ICO-like had risen to become one of the dominant genres of the scene, largely due to the success of Limbo.  Secondly, the sickening miasma that is expectation and a highly diluted market made Inside's release something of an unenviable position.  And as a matter of fact, the impact of Inside was far shallower, essentially just a brief showering of praise followed by a modest presence on the digital store of your choice (sticking out as one of those indie games you always glance at in sales, but hesitate to buy).  Which is a shame, because I'd argue Inside is a lot better than Limbo.

Inside is, at its core, much the same as Limbo, just with the privileged of better experience, better graphics, and a named developer tagged onto it's marketing.  In Inside you play as a small boy wondering through a dark and surreal world (this time far more dystopian than dark Tom Sawyer) where you are tasked with simple platforming tests and physics based puzzles.  From a gameplay standpoint, Inside rarely innovates, only occasionally showing sharp puzzle design outside of the norm (and even then, comes with one or two more unintuitive puzzles more than its predecessor).  Inside partially gets away with this by billing itself as a spiritual successor to Limbo, but what really sells it is its presentation and story.

Inside is gorgeous.  Graphically, the game uses lighting to highlight and accentuate its minimalist design, allowing for emotion to be conveyed between rectangular borders the way a skilled cinematographer would a film.  It can be downright breathtaking sometimes, and when the game and its puzzles flow elegantly, the sensation can be that of a seamless blending of two mediums.  Limbo had far better elegance in this category, with its slightly more intuitive design, but Inside holds its own nearly as well.  The minimalist aesthetic uses muted colors for most of it, allowing the peeks here and there - such as the boy's red shirt, which threatens to tip the game, along with the piles of dead bodies you find, into a Schindler's List wannabe, but saves itself in the latter two-thirds with a change of locale.  The minimalism heightens the lighting, which will shaft through water, or peek between rows of corn.  The atmosphere is evocative, and it's easy to get drunk on it alone.  Luckily, there is a story here.

Not much of one, to be honest, preferring the impressionist style of Limbo, but with a bit more focus.  The interpretations I was able to garner throughout my playthrough were certainly never original, but they were told in an emotionally resonant way.  The boy is pursued multiple times, often by things that cannot be explained.  The machinations of how the horrors ravaging this world are explained without you realizing they've been explained, usually through the solving of a puzzle, where the solution itself is the explanation.  The story threatens to get heavy handed on occasion, but there is a darkly funny tinge occasionally, often through the contrast of such a small and determined boy outsmarting a group of professionals who have, apparently, subjugated (a word almost too light for what is actually going on) an entire people.  And the game's grotesque, possibly disturbing, finale can equally wring humor out of its absurd premise.  What it comes down to mostly is craftsmanship.  A good story told by a poor artist is admirable, but hardly great.  A poor story told by someone at the peak of their craft, likewise, can be good, but never great.  For Inside, its careful not to push its chips too far into its strict plot, which is cliche, but rather on the emotional cloud that clings to it.  Playdead toy with deep themes, but usually don't spend enough time with them for you to feel the full brunt of how cliche they actually are at their core, and that's because Playdead isn't interested in a morality tale.  Its story is that of struggle, of fear, and, most of all, of resourcefulness.  Despite the dark set dressing, and the gross, disturbing finale, the story is uplifting.  It came at an awful, absurd cost, but it was a success.

Inside surpasses its predecessor not by switching gears into something with more viability, but by honing what made the first game so good and improving on it.  The game is definitely one where you need to appreciate a game's execution as much as its gameplay, but if you can buy into that then you cannot be disappointed by the wonderful, fulfilling experience Playdead was able to cram into three hours.  I'd really like to see what else Playdead can do other than this genre, because I think they may have taken it as far as it could go.



9.5           

[Game Revisited] Ark: Survival Evolved - Ragnarock

This is a review of DLC.  Therefore, the rating reflects how well it works with the game it was made for, not as a standalone.  A DLC 10 is not the same as a game's 10.  Just so we're clear.



Ark's contention with its players has been mostly well deserved, but not entirely.  In particular, Ark has long been one of the poster boys for the dangers of supporting Early Access on Steam, and to some degree they've earned it.  The game wallowed in Early Access for years without showing any sign of losing the unbelievable amount of bugs, and before releasing did the ultimate sin of Early Access games by releasing paid DLC before its official release was even scheduled.  People were obviously furious, and the reputation of Wild Card hasn't been any better since.  They've released what amounts to a large-scale mod in Atlas as a full-priced game, when they finally released the official build of Ark most of the bugs were still firmly in place (and still are, for that matter), and their game has been a nightmare from an optimization standpoint.  All-in-all, Wild Card have proved themselves to be irresponsible, and, on the merits of general developer expectation, tasteless.  There are, however, some caveats to be said.  For one, the buggyness of the game is apparently something inherit, more so the result of developer ignorance than laziness.  In certain cases, such as dinosaurs's heads clipping through walls to do damage, it seems to be a lesser evil situation as, if you've ever tried to maneuver around on the back of one of these large and powerful beasts, you'd find that a lot of its janky-ness is for better play feel rather than getting stuck on this piece of scenery or that.  It isn't an all out forgiving of what they've done, but a measured understanding.  Going into Ark is making an agreement that you are going to play something of a mess because the novelty of the thing is so high.

What Wild Card have done, on the flip side of things, is allow the community to contribute some to the game in a way not many developers do.  This comes with the obvious polar end of things where Wild Card has notoriously ignored user complaints about some of the game's issues (which, I argue, is due more to the above inheritness of the issues at hand than outright maliciousness, but let's not digress any further).  What Wild Card has done correctly is integrated community maps into the fold of psuedo-official maps, supporting official serves with the maps running and offering them as a download off of their Steam page.  The first of these was The Center, a map I never cared for but one many have liked to ascend to some sort of best of the bunch status.  It's main competitors are The Island, the original map that feels tuned to a very particular type of play, and to the second community map to find itself accepted by the buggy overlords: Ragnarock.

Ragnarock has been described in a few different ways: the perfect map, the all-in-one, and, my favorite, the retirement map.  Ragnarock did a few things that would come to define what a lot of community maps would do later.  It combined elements from multiple maps into one in a way that none of the Wild Card maps ever seem interested in doing.  It created multiple pockets for resources in a way that you could find most of them in multiple places, allowing you to stick to your quarter or so of the map if you so desired, and let the other chunks have their own people, allowing for more interesting borders.  It has one of - if not the - most diverse amount of biomes, structures, and attention to detail.  In particular is that second bit, as Ragnarock has some of the most robust structures you can find on any of the many available maps.

Ragnarock's status as a retirement map comes from a few reasons.  For one, it is most popularly considered the largest by a considerable margin (there is some minor debate about this fact as several of the maps, such as Aberration, contain an extreme amount of verticality, making the official measurement difficult; the absolute fact is that Ragnarock is by far the widest).  The map also has virtually no bosses to speak of.  There are mini bosses here and there, such as the Death Worm and, obviously, the Titanosaur or Gigantasaur, but there are no summonable bosses on the map.  Therefore, there is no real end to the map, and it can carry on as a sort of living space for whoever wants to play on it.  The varying locales also help it gain the title, as most of every type of place you could want to visit is here.  And with the addition of wyverns, the map has enough to play with that you really don't need much else.  It is, most succinctly, an easy map to play around on without the stresses of looking for resources, making multiple outposts, or fighting over certain base placement as it is either on a choke point or a valuable resource that you can get very few other places (the northern surface oil on The Island comes to mind, being one of the easiest places to get the resource so long as you have the means, which are plenty attainable in the first third of a run).

Ragnarock's continued love years after its release, however, is most definitely due to its considered and measured design.  The map oozes with personality and craftsmanship, with finely sculpted mountains, vein-like rivers, and rolling green hills.  It has rare wild plants, such as wild rock carrots, that are usually not found outside of seed form for your own farm.  Ragnarock wants you to sit awhile and take in the sights, and benefits greatly from traversal on foot.  Finding surprises as small as the dinosaur bones from A New Hope in the desert to as big as the swamp castle with its infested first floor full of spiders and bats.  The river palace, in particular, resting between two water falls near the center of the map, next to the southern most wyvern spawns, has always amazed me every time I visit, and I always mean to build a base there but never do.  And the reason I don't is because of how beautiful the wilder parts of the map are.  Being able to sculpt those desert steppes, or to turn that bridge across the mountains into a makeshift outpost for visiting the spinosaurus ravine, is a thrill I have only really felt on Valguero, and not to such a degree.  There are oodles to explore on Ragnarock, enough to fill over a hundred hours on it alone.

Ragnarock does have its issues, however.  The fact it has no end means that any run on the map always peters out rather than feeling concluded, leaving a somewhat tired taste in your mouth.  The abundant resources, likewise, make climbing the tech tree just a little too easy, depending on how dense the server you are playing on is (or if you are playing solo or with a couple of friends).  Simply put, your big end game push is likely to get wyverns, a luxury that feels somewhat windless when the utility of such a strong creature is so minimal.  You could ascend or upload your tames and self to another map, using Ragnarock as a stop-gap or as a starting place, and I would say that's about its best use.  You could also use it as your last resting place, where you take all the other tames from all the other maps and place them to live out comfortably, your home ranch.  But that isn't overtly appealing, in and of itself.

Ragnarock is a great map, one with a lot of heart and a lot of fun places to explore, but it is one that is left without the bite that other maps have, because it cannot be conquered.  It lies limply, ready for your casual or objective-less run and complies as you need it, but when you are playing a game about struggle, about resourcefulness in surviving a wild and hostile world, this feels like a curse more than a blessing.  It may not look like a curse, it may look like the chill escapade you may have envisioned when you bought the game all those years ago, but that ideal image is that of someone who has forgotten what games are about, and that is challenge and adversity.  It's great, don't let me tell you otherwise, but its greatness is in its subtly, not in its participation in the game.  It feels like it is here to be admired, not necessarily played.  It will always be the map I show newcomers because it allows you to really feel the wild air without being suffocated by it, but it's a map much like your childhood home.  It's there for you to move on.



8.0    

[Game Review] Limbo

During the late 00s Indie Game Boom, there seemed to be a game for every type.  You had Spelunky, the old-school rogue-like, rebirthing a genre long hidden from mass appeal into a best seller; Super Meat Boy, which turned classic platforming into a hard-as-nails gauntlet like how the NES days are fondly remembered, but with a modern control scheme that improved on them; Castle Crashers, as the proud bastion of the flash games that preceded the Indie Game Boom, but were just as paramount to its success; and Braid, the artistically leaning take that lead to new popular discussion on the medium and created a modern auteur out of indie developers.  Nestled amongst the others is probably a game you've heard of more, or at least just as much: Limbo was always the stylish one.  Taking after cinematic platformers and the subtlety of ICO, Limbo burst on to the scene underneath a shower of awards for design, presentation, and general appreciation.  Despite this, of all the games I've listed here, it was the hardest for me to get into.  It is nothing against the game, specifically, but more because Limbo is made for a relatively niche audience (not so niche as to avoid wild success, but niche in what is required to fully appreciate it).  I'm still not sure cinematic platformers are exactly my thing, but that doesn't mean a standout can't grab me and shake me to a tizzy.

Limbo, which has been aped to the point of annoyance (see my review of Little Nightmares for more on the subject), stood out among the crowd at the time for having the artistic flare so pined after in gaming journalism at the time without the pretension of Braid.  Limbo didn't ask you to drop the veil in order to appreciate it, to contemplate games and their purpose, their bias, and the horrors of man (well, mostly).  Instead it worked on impressions, emotions stretched taught and plucked to a melancholic melody.  It wasn't about anything, it was all feeling, all the way through.  Some of its stylistic choices, such as its surprisingly graphic violence and incredibly dark images, have become commonplace today, but at the time rarely had such maturity been given to grotesque images.  Usually, they were relegated to cheap thrills and cathartic amusement.  Limbo did something different, hoping you wouldn't take the images on screen as sensationalism, but as something weighty, that they would sink into you in a way that would linger, and largely it succeeded.  Children maneuver in shadow, like Lord of the Flies characters penetrated by the wild world around them.  Giant spiders interrogate and hunger, creating obstacles that must be outsmarted.  The impression you get is that of children playing turned toward horror, where the longing and the imagination has run away from them, and the horror and the oppressive state of the universe begins to take its toll.  You, a lone boy with a simple mission not immediately apparent to you, traverse it with bravery, a shadow among shadows, the difference between you and your adversaries the whites of your eyes, a symbol of sight others cannot see.  The world is dark and full of the awful, the writhing, and the cruel, but those whites see a clarity through the haze, much like the shafts of light that break through the unseen canopy above.     

It's effect, much like its gameplay, has somewhat dated.  As I said, some of its execution is pretty normal now, and its simple control scheme of jump, walk, and grab are so definite to the cinematic platformer and ICO-likes as to be veritable axioms of the genre.  The puzzles will vary in effectiveness depending on how familiar you are with the genre.  At this point, I am so familiar that the game played like one continuous flow until its final third, like an interactive film of early animation when they were made with silhouetted paper cutouts.

The grainy, 8mm styled filter enhances the feeling of dread and foreboding, as does the ambient soundtrack.  I'd be hesitant to call the game progressive on its effective and all encompassing style, rather I would call it influential.  It reaches a platonic form of what would come over the last ten or so years, being the precise kernel that all else would build on top of.  Surprisingly, despite some caveats where you have to remember this did it first or at least so at the onset of indie games blowing up, the game holds up incredibly well for its simplicity.  The game is by no means perfect, especially a few puzzles towards the end that ask you to play with the physics in a way that feels like you are cheating it rather than following coded direction, but it stands effectively in contrast to those who came after it.  If I had one big complaint about the game, it would be that the ending fakes you out of something magnificent.  The end pulls a trick, one that I was left floored by, but immediately twists, makes a pivot to something you'd consider more traditional.  Perfection was missed, meaning evaporated back into its vaporic state of emotional impression, and still we have a game that stands tall, but not quite as tall as it could have.   

        

9.0

[Game Review] Little Nightmares

The ICO-like genre has become so swollen at this point that it threatens fatigue.  It reminds me of the post-Jim Jarmusch indie films, before Quinten Tarantino released Pulp Fiction and turned the indie scene towards more of his genre film flair (although, let's face it, the Jim Jarmusch style didn't quite end there).  After Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise, there was a myriad of imitators looking to capture the mundane days of odd-ball characters up to absolutely nothing.  It's a style that eventually moved into the more impressionistic and the more realist, with genres such as mumblecore.  And it all got tired quickly.  It trended so hard that it felt like, regardless of how interesting a newer low budget film looked, there was that tinge of anxiety that you may have to dig for what was interesting through the same familiar style and execution that had long since lost its most effective presence.

So, too, has the ICO-like become since the release of Limbo, and although there may be an argument made that what I'm actually referring to is the cinematic platformer, I contest that there is a difference between ICO and those that came before it, namely games like Another World and Oddworld.  Particularly, ICO-likes prefer expression through verbiage as much as scenery, allowing most aspects if not all of the controls to work as symbolic or emotional expression.  Think ICO's hand holding, or the slow, lumbering way Limbo's protagonist climbs and pulls.  The identity is by some technicality that of the cinematic platformer, but of a hyper specific kind.  Much like Jim Jarmusch falls under similar categorization as John Casavetes, despite their films feeling entirely different.

With the release of each new ICO-like, I find myself simultaneously excited while releasing a groan of dread.  It's the thing that puts off my playing games I feel a pull to play, because I know that with ICO-likes it either pulls you in relatively early, or leaves you in the cold hands of boredom.  Little Nightmares manages something unique, being both a game I rather liked while still holding within it a number of complaints I feel as though I shouldn't have.  What it does well contradicts the reason these types of games are played, and while I find it a strange case, I can't help but recommend it.

Spoilers below, as the game is too short not to give up what's inside.

Little Nightmares isn't just an ICO-like, but an even more specific type of copy.  It is so like Limbo that it could ostensibly be called a Limbo-like.  You play as a small child (named Six not in the game itself, but in the store page, a habit with these types of games I'm not too fond of) sneaking and scurrying her way through a dark and twisted world, trying to avoid death.  You have your usual repertoire of verbs, such as crouching, sneaking, climbing, jumping, or pushing and pulling objects.  It strikes very similar notes to that of Limbo, but, despite its apparent unoriginal nature, there was something about the game that grabbed me at the very start.

The verbiage, for one, works slightly better here than it did in Limbo.  Where Limbo used it as a limited set of tools, in Little Nightmares it feels equally expressive.  Grabbing objects to pick them up equally lets you hug little Nome creatures that appear throughout the world (often to breadcrumb trail your way to the next location when the environment would rather spend its efforts making an impression than showing a clear path).  Turning on your lighter lets you light the dark corners of whatever room you are in, but also lets you light lanterns if you walk up to them with it out.  Climbing feels incredibly responsive, but is probably where it is spot on in par with Limbo, albeit with a slight Shadows of the Colossus feel to its controls.  Throughout Little Nightmares, it is easy to almost forget that you are holding a controller, rather that you are interacting with an eerie animated film.

The style, which does ape the creepy, dark, adult aesthetic with child in a horrific land that Limbo won awards for in part, the style itself is much more distinct.  The game feels something along the lines of a Studio Ghibli film based on Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, but directed by Guillermo Del Toro.  Although that sounds incredibly awesome typed out, in execution it leaves a little to be desired.  Locales are effective, with their German expressionist bendy and stretched decor, and Del Toro's sense of grotesque creates a noticeable film of grime on all things, especially the lumpy, warped "humans" that act as antagonists.  The Janitor, one of the first antagonists you encounter in the game, has short, stumpy legs and extremely long arms.  His being blind means he will search the room with his gross appendages whenever you step on a floorboard rather than the intended path of carpet or cloth.  He also has the unsettling tick of grinding his teeth and clicking his jaw.  The Chiefs, meanwhile, are grotesquely obese, to the point of being distasteful, depending on your particular perspective on things.  After all, their grotesqueness isn't meant to be that they are obese, but rather their obesity is supposed to show the grotesque nature of their diet.  The game effectively remains creepy and child-like throughout with its ambience and horrifying adults, fulfilling its marketing promise of being a horror game in the vain of a children's story.  The unfortunate bit comes from the game's symbolism.

What the game means is plainly meant to be up for debate.  While I enjoy art that doesn't give you concrete answers, there is a rather sly line between artful expression and borderline laziness.  I would certainly not call Little Nightmares lazy, but it feels particularly obvious they went in with an idea for aesthetic before they did any sort of expression.  Most of everything reads rather obviously on an impressionistic level, rather than keying in on resonate emotions.  Aristocratic people eat children, and do so in a grotesque, almost pig-like way, and that alone is fine.  But children are also kept in cages, starved, and Six's hunger gets so great she eventually abandons traditional food for rats, Nomes, and even a person.  Her development through the world of going from struggling survivor to monster herself was so obvious it threatened to turn me off of the experience altogether.  But I will give the game one little bit of credit, and that's that the game seemed to have given me a slight of hand, whether it was intentional or not.  The way I was reading it up to the end was an alternate take on The Jungle meets an "eat the rich" metaphor, which I thought was far too obvious to be effective outside of novelty.  It was fine enough as I enjoyed the game, but I found it more than a little disappointing that the game was putting so much effort in to what amounted to something so incredibly obvious that just making the comparison was enough to have experienced the story.  On reflection, I realized there may have been another form of symbolism that had passed me by, and while I think it was much better handled, it was also not nearly as well supported by the text.

Seen as a depiction of child abuse and its effect on a young person's perspective is far more resonate, distorting the world and its inhabitants into tortured symbols of suffering and aggression, warping the young person to be an aggressor herself.  There are the consumers, who want to take the girl and eat her, and the long armed janitor who wants to grab her, and with these alone we have ample amount of metaphors most of us would rather not think about.  The ending has her confronting the woman running this prison/food processing plant/dining establishment/residence.  It is implied somewhat that Six is the woman's daughter, although I'm not positive this is the case.  In the end, you destroy the Lady running things by showing her herself in a small mirror, because apparently she's so vain she thinks this game is about her.

The oscillating thickness-to-thinness that the game's metaphoric language takes is enough to nearly write the thing off as a good try, but not quite.  But oddly, despite this, I find the less metaphor heavy aspects to have the most impact.  The game lingers with you, and it conveys both what the game wants you to do next in each section and its atmosphere with a professional stroke, and its incredibly admirable.  Flawed experience as it is, you cannot take away a good experience by logic alone, and with that I can't help but admire Little Nightmares, reservations be damned.



7.0 

[Game Review] Animal Crossing: New Horizons

There have been about a thousand articles written about the great fortune that Animal Crossing: New Horizons would release in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.  It seemed, at least at the time, that a chores simulator would inject some much needed fantasy about the mundane into our suddenly upended lives.  The light of this disposition has begun to wane now, however, and New Horizons has begun to show its angles.

To criticize New Horizons is largely to criticize Animal Crossing as a series, as the newest entry doesn't add a whole lot that wasn't already there.  New to the series is further customization options, a rudimentary crafting system, and a whole slew of new items to collect as you dress up your home and island village to reflect whatever whim or design inspiration strikes you.  The key to Animal Crossing as a series is in injecting fun into everyday activities and hobbies.  Perhaps in real life you don't have the energy to tend a garden of flowers, arranged in such a way to maximize breeding potential for rare colors, but in Animal Crossing this is a cinch.  Maybe you feel as though that college debt will crush you any second, rarely losing weight as you chip away at it, but in Animal Crossing debt comes with the promise of a bigger house, and can be paid off at your leisure and without interest.  Spending money on the dresser you see online would set you back too much for you to gain any comfort you could possibly project onto it, but in Animal Crossing you don't need to pay for food or board.

Largely, Animal Crossing gives us chores without the hassle of their logistical demystifying, and to its credit the series has always excelled at this.  I've largely loved the series, but it is with New Horizons that the cracks have begun to show.

Those aforementioned chores are dolled out in a way that is meant to limit your day.  A considerate design choice if you look at the most likely intentions of the developers: a game designed to make you feel good getting things done with a daily limit as to how much you can do.  It seems to strike a concerned note for game-life balance.  In reality, however, the game is holding you hostage.  Missing a days worth of chores is paramount to ruining your streak on certain currencies, such as Nook Miles, which allow you a host of goodies including access to rare, randomized islands that can gain you new villagers or rare collectibles and sellable loot.  Likewise, if you knew about the money tree, missing a day could mean missing your 30k bell (the primary currency in Animal Crossing) investment.  The game deftly tangles you in small, invisible threads tugging you back to it, even when the joy has largely drained out of the action and you have Shit To Do.  As a criticism, it is both damnable and seemingly missing the point.  After all, this type of routine is one of the big draws to Animal Crossing, but routine can be paramount to habit, and habit can be addiction, and the lines between this triptych are so effectively blurred that the dividers look like a Monet painting through a squint.  The game is habit forming, entirely, and it is an incredibly fun habit to form, but one equally hard to stop.

The game's desire to waste your time isn't just in motivating you to schedule it in against your will (so to speak; don't take me too literally on that).  The new crafting system does at times give you interesting recipes to make all of the resources found throughout New Horizons useful and in feeding into the main gameplay loop, which is in customizing places bit by bit.  You learn new crafting recipes constantly, and they are often themed, making collecting them a lot of fun as you start to envision new styles to give rooms in your house.  But within this nice feedback loop lies a particularly time wasting mechanic: breakable items.  Your axe, shovel, etc. will all break, and they will break often, making that chore you wish to do take that much longer when you've encountered the off day.  You can bypass this largely by paying for the equipment rather than making it, but the game incentivizes you replace them by rewarding Nook Miles for your umpteenth crafted item.  The Nook Miles system has some truly nice rewards to it, allowing you to feel rewarded by just simply playing the game, but it equally rewards you for taking the long route to everything.  Sure, you don't need to water wild flowers, but there are Nook Miles attached to watering a certain number.  And would you look at that, your water pail broke!  Lucky for you you can build another, which also feeds into a Nook Miles reward.  To do so, you need to get your shovel and hit some stones until you get metal, then you need to chop at trees until the right wood comes out and - oh!  Your axe broke!  No matter . . .

The loop is insidious, and I'm not just being a naysayer when I complain about the mundane aspects of a game built around mundane gameplay, lest we forget.  These are popular issues, as any google search on New Horizons could attest.  The issue isn't that these are mild annoyances, it is that they are core parts of the gameplay.  The game is designed outright to be a waste of time so that you feel good wasting time.  An idle game in image, but a habit in actuality.  And this is where the crux lies.  What sets off the habit side of the game with such malice is that things are locked to days in real world time, meaning you are, essentially, complying with a set of rules that says if you want to complete this game you have to play it all year long, sans any future updates or events that could modify the amount of stuff there is to collect.

Collecting is by far and away my favorite part of any Animal Crossing game, and New Horizons does not disappoint on this front.  Collecting bugs, fish, art, and fossils are awesome and a big part of why I continued on as I was feeling the joy drained out of me.  But those, too, become habits once fossils are limited to four or so a day, and bugs and fish come out at different seasons or times of day.  I fell into it, just as I have with many other games in the past.  I'm not new to habit forming games, but there is a particular issue with Animal Crossing that feels misleading.

New Horizons has a similar habit-informed stress level that World of Warcraft or Diablo does, but instead of being forthright about it, it tries to disguise it beneath a veneer of docility and charm.  And to be fair, the game is that cute, it is that charming, it is that fun to cast your line every day in hope of a better catch than the last's.  New Horizons, despite my post filled with complaints, is a good game, I can't deny that.  But it was a good game with poor principles, with a nasty side that didn't show up until you were too deep into it to gracefully exit.  I loved my time with New Horizons during my first half of the playthrough, but the latter half was equally one of the most disappointed I'd been with myself.  For all the praise the game had at release for injecting some normalcy into people's lives while we were cooped up waiting for the world to return to normal (ha!), what we got in reality was subjugation.  A cute, charming subjugation that gave me as much fun as it did set a horrible precedent for the ongoing quarantine.  I loved it, and I hated it.  Animal Crossing has a good core idea, but I really wish it would lay off my back just a tad.



7.5