New Horizons is still about waking up each day, making friends with local animal characters, laying out furniture in your home, and donating dinosaur fossils to the nearby museum. The king of the islandĭespite the jump in visual fidelity, the heart of Animal Crossing hasn’t changed. Even though these visual details are purely aesthetic, they all combine to make the environment feel bustling and vibrant. Each creepy centipede leg is visible the moment it pops out from beneath a rock, for better or worse.īits of furniture have always had some level of interactivity to them, but now you can clearly make out the hands of a clock as it ticks away, or the record player as it spins the latest K.K. New Horizons offers a much higher level of detail on even the smallest of critters. A pillbug on a 240p screen is basically a dot. One of the main activities in Animal Crossing is catching and selling bugs. These beautiful moments were previously muddied up and obscured by the 240p Nintendo 3DS screen in the otherwise-excellent Animal Crossing: New Leaf.īut the boost in resolution isn’t just for the atmosphere it has an impact on the entire game. New Horizons is the first full Animal Crossing game in HD, and the impact is dramatic. If you want curated lists of our favorite media, check out What to Play and What to Watch. When we award the Polygon Recommends badge, it’s because we believe the recipient is uniquely thought-provoking, entertaining, inventive, or fun - and worth fitting into your schedule. Polygon Recommends is our way of endorsing our favorite games, movies, TV shows, comics, tabletop books, and entertainment experiences. I feel the spray of the sea on my face, and I breathe deeply. All I can hear are the waves and the wind rushing through the trees as the game’s soundtrack takes a minimalist turn. I hike out to a remote beach on the north side of this island on my second day and just look up at the open, orange sky as the sun slips below the horizon. like, fair.Īnd his place really is peaceful. Random animal villagers talk about how they needed a break from the world and came here for some peace and quiet. Tom Nook, the famous raccoon/oligarch, starts off your visit to his island with a luau, complete with fruit cocktails in front of a roaring bonfire. The setting doesn’t have a major impact on the story or gameplay, but tonally, it does add an air of chill to the whole thing. The shift in New Horizons is that this all takes place on a tropical island instead of in a nondescript wilderness. It’s about living in a world where the biggest concern is whether your apples are going to be ready for picking today or tomorrow. There’s satisfaction in finding a new, rare fish you’ve never caught before, or saying hi to a neighbor, only to receive the perfect birdbath as a housewarming present. Or maybe you just want to make your house as pretty as possible, filling it with matching furniture and wallpaper? If you’d rather focus on gathering critters to donate to the local museum, developing an extensive arrangement of living exhibits, that’s also an option. If you’d prefer to plant trees and make a forested wonderland, you can do that. It’s a low-pressure life sim where you’re free to fill the days however you like. New Horizons doesn’t deviate from the core gameplay of Animal Crossing much at all. But suddenly, the child is saddled with the debt of their first house, and must sell bugs and fish to settle up. Suddenly, a large raccoon appears from the shadows with a proposition. Getting away from it allĪnimal Crossing: New Horizons begins the same way as the four previous games in the core series: A childlike human finds themself in the middle of the wilderness. It’s been two weeks since I set foot in the Polygon office, and I’ve been keeping my time outside to a minimum.Īnd so Animal Crossing: New Horizons is my vacation now. Maybe this is why so many people have been looking forward to the newest Animal Crossing game, seeing it as a viable vacation simulation in the face of self-imposed isolation. If ever there were a time to hop on a plane and kick it on a deserted island for a few months, it’s right now.īut that’s not really an option for most of us.
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