Back in April, I started playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
Animal Crossing is a series of video games based around the concept of the player’s character living their daily life in a rural setting among cutesy animal villagers. Players earn by selling fruit, fish, and anything else they can find. Later versions of the game also give the player a position of power, such as the mayor in New Leaf or the resident representative in New Horizons.
During this lockdown, I’ve wished on over 200 stars, caught over 2,500 fish, received a five-star island rating, and, in total, logged over 380 hours on an island where everyone has the same dreams.
I grew up playing previous installments of Animal Crossings: first City Folk, then Wild World — both fuzzy, warm, childhood memories. When I moved back in with my parents because of COVID-19, playing Animal Crossing again felt fitting — soothing, homey, and soft. During a pandemic, especially, it was easy — comforting — to invest in this island where cute characters of my choosing randomly shower me with gifts and call me “shortcake.”
When running from a swarm of wasps one time, I realized that if you sit down on a tree stump, they will circle around you forever, until you eventually give up and let them sting you a million times. I feel like this accurately sums up my lockdown experience.
From having to give up my apartment and move back home, to losing my summer job and all internship prospects, and the hammer that the past few months have taken to my mental health, there always seems to be some doom just lurking around the corner.
The night I downloaded the game, I was up until 4:00 am. I paid off my first mortgage that night, and the following one the next night and the one after that. The game’s not meant to be grinded, but those first couple weeks, I let it consume me. Every time I’d grow tired of it, there’d be some new feature to discover and explore.
It lets me garden and go to the beach, all while locked in my home. Sometimes, I’ll craft furniture in Resident Services just to hear Tom Nook clap, or I’ll walk up to a villager and emote a “joy” reaction to see them do the same back — an action, though pointless, that fills me with immense joy.
I’ve been watching island tours and reading articles about different game features late into the night. It’s been raining nonstop on my island for about a week now. The sky looks the same around the clock — cloudy and dim — but in the odd moment when the sky is clear, I stare at the stars waiting for something to happen. A lot of the game feels like waiting for something amazing to happen — wishing for a miracle.
Back in April, I became enthralled with finding ‘tarantula island’ — a rare island that you can visit through the game’s randomized island-hopping function. The spiders in the game are chilling — aggressive, unnervingly large, and fond of chasing you. But they sell for a pretty buck, and, at the time, I had a mortgage and symbolic mouths to feed.
The idea was terrifying, yet thrilling. I burned plane ticket after plane ticket trying to find this mythical nightmare; I never found it — I never even came close.
A month later, I became obsessed with shooting stars. Wishing on them gets you materials you need to build certain furniture and tools. It took me so long to see a falling star that I’d convinced myself that there was a glitch with my game. When I finally spotted one, my heart raced, fingers fumbled on the controls to wish on it before it disappeared.
I’ve wished on over 200 now — a number that astounds me every time I check it — and yet every new one I see still brings that thrill and moment of panic with it.
The details of the game also never fail to amaze me. Not just the details but also the peculiarities — I wonder what is deliberate, and what isn’t. I realized something in the way that Blathers — the sleepy owl who runs the museum — speaks. He asks the same question twice in each conversation: the first in perfect grammar and the second time phrased, “Is there anything else I can help you with?”
That dangling preposition haunted me. However, I recently dug out my old Nintendo DS out of boredom, and 2005 Blathers doesn’t use it — it was added in later versions of the game. It’s eerie to see exactly how he’s evolved over the years, becoming a little bit more human.
Overwhelmingly, however, over these last couple of months, New Horizons has been something of a crutch. Not only as a stable, dependable world during a period of chaos and a way to pass my time, but there’s also something to be said about the relaxing element of the game. Villager after villager tells me something along the lines of “chill out” or “have a cup of tea and relax,” sentiments that I like to equate to Billy Joel’s “Vienna.”
Sometimes, when I’m stressed, I’ll lay down on the ugly plastic beach chair that I put next to the water with a coconut juice and pretend that that’s luxury. Somehow, watching my little character soak in the sun almost feels relaxing.
When the update on July 3 introduced swimming features, I swam for hours. I chased a gigas giant clam in rings around the island; it always seemed to be just beyond my reach — pausing, waiting, taunting me. I spent all day swimming and diving in imaginary waters.
Occasionally, I’d head back to shore when I needed to step away from the console due to the unreasonable fear that my character would drown out there, though she always seems to know when to come back for air and how to endlessly tread water without growing tired.
I’ve seen a lot of articles online about the game’s weeds. They’re intended to be a nuisance, something to pick and eradicate. But something happened at the start of the summer when the game updated to display them as unruly, yet hauntingly beautiful ones that grow tall and sprout yellow and purple flowers.
Right now, with everything going on during this pandemic, I don’t feel like I quite know anything, but in the meantime, I’m growing out my weeds, watering them till they grow tall, and planting them where they’ve been picked.
