Nintendo’s pandemic-era hit Animal Crossing: New Horizons got another major update last week, along with a £5 Switch 2 upgrade that makes it look and run better on the new console. Last year, I threw a new year’s party for my children in the game, but apart from that I have barely touched my island since the depths of lockdown, when sunny Alba was my preferred escape from the monotonous misery of the real world. Back then, I spent more than 200 hours on this island. Stepping out of her (now massive) house, my avatar’s hair is all ruffled and her eyes sleepy after a long, long time aslumber.
I half-expected Alba to be practically in ruins, but it’s not that bad. Aside from a few cockroaches in the basement and a bunch of weeds poking up from the snow, everything is as it was. The paths that I had laid out around the island still lead me to the shop, the tailors, the museum; I stop by to visit Blathers the curatorial owl, and he gives me a new mission to find a pigeon called Brewster so that we can open a museum cafe. “It’s been four years and eight months!” exclaims one of my longtime residents, a penguin called Aurora. That can’t be right, can it? Have I really been ignoring her since summer 2021? Thankfully, Animal Crossing characters are very forgiving. I get the impression they’ve been getting along perfectly fine without me.
I take myself on a little tour of Alba, investigating all the things I’d forgotten I made. Atop the highest cliffs on the island I find a half-finished bamboo zen garden. Down by the beach there is a playground; I had a baby and a toddler back in 2020 and I was spending a lot of time in playgrounds. The whole place is testament to the extent of my homesickness during the pandemic, during which I was stuck in a suboptimal basement flat in Brighton: the island flag is a saltire, the island tune is the first couple of bars of Scotland the Brave.
I check my bank account and find over 2 million bells in there. How the hell did I accumulate 2 million bells from selling fish and fossils? With the help of a further 99,000 bells of interest, I pay off the final instalment of my home loan, forgetting that there’s no real point in doing this except personal satisfaction. I am now penniless, but at least I am out from under the thumb of the Tom Nook financial empire. That loan-shark raccoon has got nothing on me now.
There’s a new building: a hotel perched on the end of the pier, run by a family of pirate kappa. Home decoration was never my favourite part of Animal Crossing so I am not exactly thrilled to be asked to put together new rooms for the guests, but there have been a lot of improvements to this activity since I last played – placing cute little furniture items and paintings on the floor and walls is much easier than it was, especially using the Switch 2 controller as a mouse. I throw together a nautical theme for the first room and discover that the rewards for this work are tiny versions of old Nintendo toys and consoles. I start mentally planning out a games room back at my house.
Rather than face all the tidying up, some of my friends have ditched their pandemic-era islands and started again, which involves a level of dedication to the game that I can only respect. There’s a new service – run by Mr Resetti, the angry mole who used to yell at you for turning off the game without saving in the early-00s era of Animal Crossing – that lets you wipe everything off the ground of your island, leaving it clear for terraforming and redecorating. It’s also now easier to make those outdoor transformations, as you can hold L to stick your character to the island’s invisible grid, making it much easier to place things like walls and roads. And crops, I discover. Did you know Animal Crossing has farming now? And food recipes? This was news to me. Now I make my mini-me a smoothie before my morning rounds of Alba.
I am surprised at how quickly I fall back into the rhythm of Animal Crossing. It’s such a soothing game, with so many outlets for creativity. Much of this update’s new stuff is for people with more time than me – for instance, you can decorate entire new Slumber Islands with friends while your avatar sleeps, but what was always great about this game is that it doesn’t require much from you. You can spend a peaceful half hour every day checking in on your small world, or you can spend many hours creating custom fashions for your residents and tourists, and designing every square metre of the island to your specifications.
Back in the 90s, Animal Crossing was a game born from loneliness: Nintendo’s Katsuya Eguchi came up with the original idea for the game because moving to Kyoto had separated him from his friends and family in Chiba, near Tokyo. He envisioned a game that fostered a sense of community, that families could play together. (You can read a lot more about this series’ origins in my book about Nintendo, by the way – it’s out in a couple of weeks.) So it feels very poetic that Animal Crossing ended up saving the whole world from loneliness in 2020. It’s taken me a long while to feel good about returning to Alba, and it’s been a surprise to discover that this game is now better than it’s ever been.
What to play
Man was I sleeping on Dispatch. I played all of its eight episodes over the course of a week and I have never laughed aloud so often at a video game. A narrative game in the vein of the old Telltale adventures The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us, and made by many of the same people, it tells the story of washed-up superhero, Robert Robertson III, who is sent to work at a call centre and put in charge of a team of mardy former supervillains on a rehabilitation programme. The animation is superb, the characters and acting memorable, and the dialogue quick-witted. It would have made a great animated series, but it makes an even better choice-centric video game. Anything with superheroes is usually an instant “no” from me, but this is clever and funny without the boringly self-referential humour that usually infests the genre.
Available on: PS5, PC; Nintendo Switch/2 versions coming 28 January
Estimated playtime: 8-9 hours
What to read
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Amazon MGM Studios released a first image of Game of Thrones actor Sophie Turner as Lara Croft in the forthcoming Tomb Raider TV series. Angelina Jolie and Alicia Vikander were the previous two on-screen Crofts; Turner says she has been training eight hours a day, five days a week for the past year for the role.
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Newish independent site Design Room has gone deep on the groundbreaking 2008 parkour game Mirror’s Edge, in an in-depth history written by frequent Guardian Games contributor Lewis Gordon.
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Another online multiplayer game was put to bed last week: 2019’s sci-fi mech shooter Anthem, one of the first live-service flops of the current era. It was made by BioWare – a studio better known for its RPGs. Its producer Mark Darrah released a four hour (!) postmortem video on YouTube, summarised here by VGC.
What to click
Question Block
A few weeks ago I asked for your most-anticipated games of 2026 (mine are here). Reader Ee simply responded with the words Fatal Frame – there’s a remake of the second instalment in this iconic Japanese ghost photography series coming in March. Nora picked out The Mermaid Mask – a “funny and creepy point-and-click mystery” – and TOEM 2, the sequel to a beloved black-and-white photography game. Andrew is looking forward to the interesting mix of characters in Resident Evil 9, which stars relatively defenceless newcomer Grace and seasoned zombie-killer Leon Kennedy.
Brad is hoping for a new 3D Mario on Switch 2, as am I – Nintendo usually announces games late, so I think the odds are good. And I’m sorry, Maks, but the odds aren’t so great on this finally being the year that we see Half-Life 3, so I can’t share in your optimism. I’ve lost so many bets about that game that I’ve given up for good.
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