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
No comments:
Post a Comment