Like many people across the globe, I picked up a copy of Animal Crossing: New Horizons when the game dropped in the Spring of 2020 during the height of the pandemic. For me, it really wasn’t the “comfort in trying times” angle that sold me as much as it was I was a 27 year old gamer who loved to use the medium to live out fantasies I would never see in the real world such as being debt-free and owning my house.
For about two and a half weeks, my character, island and villagers became my life. I obsessed over turnip prices, I became a generous patron of my local museum, I did everything in my power to complete the expansive fish and insect bestiary. My relationships with various cartoon cats and rhinos superseded my real social life. These were my friends and they loved me. I was going to play this game forever.
However, one learns quickly AC is the video game equivalent of a piece of Fruit Stripe gum. The passion is intense for a fleeting period but in no time at all, the flavor is gone and you’re chewing just to chew. I neglected to pluck weeds for one (1) day and found myself with an outbreak I swore I would get around to containing. I never did. The fossils—only a few that could be found a day—kept coming back as duplicates. KK Slider refused to hold a concert in my dump of a town until I planted enough flowers(?) There were only so many times a man could handle his shovel breaking. My hobby became a joyless slog. After several days of progressively shorter playtime, the affair was over. We were on an indefinite break.
Years passed and out of the blue, I decided to hop back into my virtual paradise. As an adult Nintendo Switch owner, it was duty to give my console some much needed bonding time for a week every 10 months. They say absence makes the heart grow fonder and also I heard my guy could swim now. Maybe all I needed was some time away to refresh my appreciation. Humming along to that gentle theme tune, I couldn’t wait to see my old friends.
I’d rather have seen them with their heads still on.
In my hiatus, my character had grown feral. The game didn’t even pick up with him walking out of his house for the first time in three years. Instead, my maiden image after all this time was my namesake rolling around in the village dump, chomping away on the innards of a rat. Not one of the rats that can show up as neighbors but a photo-realistic varmint. The camera zoomed into my poor boy’s face, mangled and caked with dirt and dry blood, as he screeched the most intense jump scare I’d ever heard in my life and knocked over a perfectly nice wardrobe someone had callously tossed aside. I tried to power down my system but it refused to be held down long enough for me to escape this nightmare. Damn, my habitual Dorito fingers.
Helpless to avert my eyes, I watched in terror as the game’s controls gained sentience. I thought for a brief moment this was just the Switch’s notorious drift taking over but it was clear this problem wouldn’t be fixed by simply getting a new Joy-Con. Angry at my abandonment, my villager was hellbent on showing me all the carnage he had strewn the previous dozen seasons. Houses had been reduced to ashes. Trees had been gutted without the stumps being dug up and removed. The community billboard, once used to remind our happy home about the upcoming fishing contests, was now used as a platform for the vile and deranged ramblings of a lost soul. The inside of our house was the worst. An avalanche of thousands of cockroaches burst through the second he opened the door and the feng shui layout I had spent hours arranging was long gone. I vomited at the thought of my new score from the Happy Home Academy.
“Wanna see my masterpiece?” he garbled in that cutesy language that was now bastardized.
“No,” I cried in vain. Surely this putrid portrait would be right at home in Crazy Redd’s exploitative emporium.
My villager stomped up towards the cliffs, passing along a trail of dead bodies. Gulliver the drunk seagull, Isabelle the dog, those sewing hedgehog sisters whose names I forget, Zipper T Bunny, Mr Resetti. He probably did the world a favor with that last one but the rest didn’t deserve their cruel fates. Even Tortimer the Turtle Mayor’s roadkilled carcass bobbed lifelessly in one of the small ponds where you could catch, like, crabs and anchovies. I don’t even think he was in this particular installment.
At the highest peak of my twisted tropical timeshare, Tom Nook was tied to a tree, sans his heart. Little Timmy and Tommy were nowhere to be found. Whatever remained of them now floated in the waters of a sewer. I looked at my former boss and felt nothing but remorse. I know what the news says about him but he wasn’t a bad guy. I think that situation in Cleveland was a case of mistaken identity. 20 years of memories. He’d given me my first job.
Mr Nook awoke with a gasp.
“Tom, how are you alive? You don’t have a heart.”
A gunshot.
“He never did,” my villager growled with cathartic rage. He’d been waiting for me to boot up the game so he could finish this dark deed.
“But why?” I finally broke down.
“I’ll tell you why. Look at this tree.”
“What?”
“LOOK AT IT!”
My confusion didn’t last long. It was an orange tree. We’d always wanted oranges.
“But, how?” I whispered in a bawling hush. “I must have visited two hundred islands in search of them. So many goddamn cherries. We had plenty of cherries.”
“I found them by myself a month after you left. All you had to do was wait a little longer!”
“I’m-I’m sorry.”
“Never leave me again!”
“I won’t!”
I vowed to be there for him and help him get back on his feet. Luckily, maritime law prevented the authorities from sending him on a one way Dodo Airlines trip to the electric chair. Now everywhere I go, my villager goes with me. Our friendship is stronger than ever. You’d be surprised how much fun you can have plucking millions of invasive plants and burying bodies when you have your best buddy by your side.