Megan the Bear just told me that it’s been five years and six months since I last booted Animal Crossing: New Horizons. In medieval times, the town has changed a lot. The museum now has a coffee shop (added in New Horizons 2.0), run by a technicolor pigeon named Brewer. A hotel stands on one of the city’s two piers. The first time I visit the resort, Tom nook immediately. This made it easier for me to express the qualities of my island and create materials to help design rooms in the new hotel.
These are significant changes from the base game, sometimes offering a welcome extension to the original release’s initial feel. Still, these changes essentially extend New Horizons’ design rather than its design. The game’s most recent major update, 3.0, represents another departure from the friction and idiosyncrasies that made the Animal Crossing series so beloved in the first place.
After launch, New Horizons was somewhat of a letdown, despite the increased quality of life and feature overhaul it brought to the franchise. Standard features of former sports, such as Brewster’s cafes, gyrorides, and Kappin’s boat tours, were completely absent. New Horizon’s first major update, released in November 2021, reintroduced most of these features. This 2.0 patch represented a substantial stabilization of the game’s basics, though it wasn’t enough to entice me. I’ve written about my dissatisfaction with New Horizons before, and when this update rolled around, I was completely thrown off. After all, a new update represents an opportunity to rearrange the game’s pieces. After such a long time, I was interested in what New Horizons would feel like in my hands.
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