Animal Crossing is finally being played at the right speed

When Animal Crossing: New Horizons was first released in March, the game was a remake of the monotony of lockdown. Players spent hours on hours improving and terraforming their islands. New horizons was a game that felt easy to binge, especially if you traveled the clock for time to get faster resources.

As a community, it seems to be imperative at the time more, more, more. After the game’s debut, I spent hours – days – on a time to perfect my island. But when the time is up, the amount of time I spend on the game per day is gradually diminishing. Five months after its first release, life on the island is slower.

After that initial rush of building, terraforming, and collecting achievements, the impetus to play for hours at a time has diminished, making a place a daily routine for check-in. Now, signing up I mean one loop around my island, checking to see whats new in the stores and looking for daily spawns. Sometimes I still spend hours fishing, gardening, or furnishing furniture, but more than an hour into the game has become a rarity.

Image: Nintendo EPD / Nintendo

De Animal Crossing franchise has always been about capturing a part of life, and taking the time to build a home and community. The oldest Animal Crossing game, released for the GameCube in 2001, required no waiting like that New horizons does. Everything in town was already established, which meant the player could dive right into those small, daily tasks.

Binging has never been the model for the series. But it became the way many players first consumed New horizons because it launched shortly after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Players sat at home with little to do differently, so escaping into a world without pandemics and working to make it inaccessible seemed to be the perfect remedy. Making messages with the game’s clock, which reflects real time, to skip the required waiting time for certain events (setting up the whole museum, waiting for flowers to bloom), was a small price to pay to get so much of play the game at the same time possible.

Using time travel, New horizons can be binged, and even without it, the game stimulates a certain completistic mindset – the museum asks players to catch all the wild species that come up each month. But filling out your museum requires time spread out over seasons, and time travel has consequences. Fortunately, there is no penalty for just waiting – if you miss a seasonal event or creature, they will come again next year, and taking a break will not have any serious consequences.

In previous iterations, Animal Crossing would punish players by leaving villagers away if players lost the game too long. The mechanic of the city weeds remains the same, however New horizons saves villagers until you give them permission to leave, which means there are no serious consequences to cutting back on how often you sign up. Logging in every day is not necessary; players can take things at their own pace. There are still incentives to spend a lot of time on your island, but they are so often delivered via updates instead of everything being directly accessible. The game grows with the pace of a slow jog, not a sprint. New horizons is less something to defeat and win, and more an ongoing, constantly evolving experience.

The biggest proof of that New horizons is an experience made to entertain, not to be binged, is that, although the game’s initial milestones are now out of the way, players are still innovative. They create their own ways to enjoy the game. Seasonal updates mean new features, such as swimming in the ocean, but they are features that offer the player more ways to explore instead of just performing achievements. The point of INnimal Crossing is not the destination, if there is even one. It’s the journey.