I preordered Animal Crossing: New Horizons back in January, before any of us knew what March was going to look like, and it showed up right on schedule yesterday, March 20th, a Friday, $59.99 at retail or through the eShop if your download queue wasn't already backed up to next Tuesday.
I want to talk about the timing here because it's genuinely strange. The Bay Area's shelter-in-place order kicked in Tuesday morning, and Newsom extended that statewide Thursday night. So the exact week a big chunk of California got told to stay inside, Nintendo happened to release a game about staying on a small island and slowly building a life out of nothing. I don't think anyone at Nintendo planned it that way, games like this get locked into a release date a year or more in advance, marketing beats scheduled, review copies sent out on a fixed calendar. It's just an accident of timing so weird it barely feels like an accident.
Downloaded mine off the eShop starting around 9pm Thursday since the unlock is midnight local time, and the download itself took almost three hours on my connection, which is either my ISP or Nintendo's servers buckling under a launch that landed square in the middle of everyone being home with nothing else to do. Hard to say which honestly. Booted it up a little after midnight, sat through the Nook Inc. orientation, filled out a tent form, picked an island layout from a couple options, named my character, and by 1am I had a lean-to and Tom Nook already talking to me about a loan.
Small complaint, because there's always one. Online play with friends requires a Nintendo Switch Online subscription, $19.99 a year, on top of the $59.99 you already paid for the cartridge. Not new, Nintendo's been charging for online since 2018, but it stings more right now when visiting a friend's island is basically the only kind of visiting anybody can safely do this month. Feels like exactly the wrong week to be nickel-and-diming multiplayer.
The game itself, six or seven hours in, is doing what the last one did back in 2012 except with a lot more crafting bolted on. You gather wood and stone and weeds off your own island, build a workbench, craft tools and furniture from recipes, a whole DIY system that wasn't in New Leaf. There's a NookPhone now instead of ringing a bell at a kiosk, and Nook Miles running alongside regular Bells as a second currency, which is one more thing to track but mostly just rewards you for doing stuff you'd do anyway. Time still runs in real time tied to your Switch's clock, so my island is sitting in the tail end of winter right now, same as outside my window, and apparently K.K. Slider plays a little acoustic set on your island every Saturday night once you've been at it long enough.
None of that is complicated to explain and that's sort of the whole appeal. After a week of refreshing case-count numbers and watching my own employer scramble to figure out whether Zoom could hold up under half the office dialing into a 9am standup, spending an evening deciding where to put a bridge over a river that only exists on a cartridge was the first time all week my brain actually slowed down. I'm aware that's a slightly embarrassing thing to admit on a tech blog. I don't especially care.
Early review scores are sitting in the low 90s on Metacritic, which tracks with what I'm seeing so far, this is a genuinely well made game and not just a well timed one. But I'd be lying if I said the timing wasn't doing a lot of the emotional lifting here. Nintendo built a slow, low stakes game about starting over on an empty island more than a year before anyone knew what the rest of March 2020 was going to look like, and now a lot of people are opening it at exactly the moment they need something slow and low stakes the most.
Consoles are apparently already getting hard to find, a friend texted me last night saying two different stores near her were sold out of the Switch entirely. If that keeps up through April, the next post on this might be less about a fun little life sim and more about how impossible it's gotten to actually buy the hardware to run it on.