My house in Animal Crossing: New Horizons looks like the “guys really live in apartments like this” meme. My landscaping looks like the set of Holes. The host of a Netflix gardening show might issue a begrudging nod toward my patchy garden before they trip on a half-buried tire on their way out and stumble into a bramble of unpruned weeds.
Widely lauded—including by WIRED—as the perfect pastime for this quarantine moment, Animal Crossing: New Horizons must mean to be relaxing. It has the telltale signs: chibi animals talking in high-pitched mumblesqueaks, a lazy island guitar soundtrack, flowers literally everywhere. I can fish on the seaside, or chase a blue butterfly. I can dye my hair pink and lay a picnic basket along the river’s edge. There are no threats, except a couple of choice insects, and I can’t even fall off a hillside. Invisible bowling bumpers line each one.
And yet Animal Crossing: New Horizons is relaxing to me the way a high-end Maui resort may be relaxing—the kind where at-attention employees taxi $20 cocktails to your stinging-hot metal beach chair atop 500 truckloads of stolen white sand. I sit out in the sun, getting more and more intoxicated, but nothing stops the stinging and the bill just keeps getting steeper.
How is it possible to feel so completely unrelaxed in Animal Crossing? I’ve wondered this for hours, pitching my brain against the game’s repetitive dialogue, frustrating mechanics, and obsession with debt bondage in search for a lasting dopamine high. And while I’ve enjoyed small, short-lived bursts of joy—a new fish species, a gift dropped from a balloon!—in the end, Animal Crossing has only felt like the grind, charmingly reskinned.
In Animal Crossing, your character purchases a “deserted island package,” and leaves the workaday world behind to live on a pristine, naturally beautiful enclave. Once you arrive, a tanuki named Tom Nook, founder and president of Nook Inc., who sold you the package, explains what you can do there to unwind: upgrade your tent into a house, decorate that house, craft tools, mine materials, make furniture. Doing so, he says in what I imagine to be the voice of Gilmore Girls’ Taylor Doose, will help you pay back the steep loan you apparently took out to be there.
So you work. You knock axe against stone, shovel against dirt, and when those axes and shovels break, as they always do so quickly, you make yourself a new one with haste. You catch fish and pick fruit and dig for fossils and sell it all to Nook’s henchman in exchange for “bells,” the island currency, to pay back your loan. You can also play the Stalk Market, and wait hours in a line of hundreds of other players to sell turnips at good prices. If you want respite from this saccharine indentured servitude, you can fly to someone else’s island and literally pillage it.
Eventually, through hard work and savvy financing, players can make or buy enough items to express themselves in Animal Crossing. And how impressively they do. The internet is littered with screenshots of Animal Crossing zen gardens and manicured replicas of the Jardins du château de Versailles. I see millennial pink homes garnished with succulents worthy of a Brooklyn high rise and British tea rooms all prepped for the Queen. I love your maid outfit and cannot get over the details on that mumu. I’m impressed, even a little jealous.
Meanwhile, I am sneaking up on a locust with my bug net spring-loaded. Slowly inching toward the flower it rests on, I position my net just so before slamming it down and, somehow, catch myself an invisible cherry blossom petal instead. My net immediately breaks, and the locust disappears into the brush. I must craft a new net. Racing around my island, I vigorously shake every tree until five wood branches drop. I return home to my workbench. When I go back outside, net in hand, a lucky second locust catches my eye. Slowly, I move toward it. I carefully aim, triangulating on the damn thing like a warship missile, and sink the net down. I miss. The locust is gone.
