An Idiot Plays Animal Crossing New Horizons

It’s early December and I have a new game to play. I turn on my Switch Lite and go to the home menu, then select the only game present. After a title screen and a loading screen, I am now playing Animal Crossing New Horizons. Although I’ve seen and heard plenty about this game series, I’ve never actually played Animal Crossing.

Granted, I’ve only ever played a handful of Nintendo games, but this is special. This is a Nintendo game which I own alongside my Switch.

Anyway, welcome to a potential new series: An Idiot Plays Animal Crossing

“Jeez, Medic, that’s a bit harsh on yourself.”

Yeah nah. When it comes to video games, I am always trash at them. I’m not just a slow learner, I also have pretty slow reaction times. Combined with being clumsy 24/7 and my easily being confused, most games I play end up with a mess. I’ve had people watch me play and visibly cringe while doing so.

At least Animal Crossing isn’t a game you can technically lose. I just need to take things nice and slow.

A warm and long welcome.

I’ll admit, although it’s a long, dragged out conversation, I did find the introduction to the game to be quite cute. Sure, I spend most of my time reading what they say, buy the little raccoons are cute. The more terrifying thing here though is the character creation screen. Normally, I try and make my player character look good. But here? It’s all kinda… uneasy. I’ve never really liked Nintendo’s human character designs and I don’t like the Mii, they all seem too artificial and dead inside.

What annoys me more is that I can’t be a cute animal character myself. But oh well. Anyway, time to build a tent on a deserted island paradise. Alongside a rhino and a pig.

Wandering around, placing houses.

The first task I am given is to place my tent. I then have to help the pig and the rhino with their own tents. That’s fine, I’ll put them really far away from me. I don’t really like neighbours anyway. I’ve put both houses in real pain-in-the-ass positions, and don’t know how to deal with the issue.

Oh well, that’s a mistake I’ll have to fix later, somehow. I have many other chores I need to do first. Have to tidy things up and overall learn how Animal Crossing even works.

In the mean time, I’ve been gathering fossils and stuff, so I can open a museum. Honestly, I really don’t get why this is happening. Blathers the Owl seems like an okay guy, but why ARE we building a museum before we’ve worked out other necessities, like clean water.

I am completely fumbling with the controls though. Multiple times, I find myself pressing A instead of B or vice versa. I lost a pretty blue butterfly because of this.

“But I don’t want more debt!”

After doing a lot of basic work, the scummy raccoon is ready to pedal his next business tactic. He wants me to get a loan so I can build my house. But I like my tent! And I’ve already paid off the travel fees, which you should have warned me about from the start! Bloody hell, this whole island scheme is a massive monopoly and a scam.

Of course, Nook’s going to offer me a loan for however much a new home costs. Because he knows I’m basically trapped on this island and can’t do much else. What a great scheme this guy runs.

I won’t settle for that though! He wants nearly 100,000 bells for this house? I’ll go and sell everything so I can stay out of debt!

Nothing else left to sell.

Unfortunately, I lost patience in the matter. In the end, I gave in. I had picked up pretty much every single weed I could find, I shook every tree and searched every corner. But I was only at 55,000 bells. Not too bad considering how much fumbling around I’ve been doing. Sadly, I gave up after getting half way done through the loan. On the plus side, it means I can already pay back half the loan, but I’m still not happy.

Anyway, Nook the Crook agrees to the deal and says I’ll have a house. But he only asks one thing about my house: what colour the roof will be. Nothing else. Of course, I pick yellow.

So now we wait and see what my house looks like. Because I have to wait for it to be built. And that takes real time…