Animal Crossing: New Horizons

It’s weird to say that New Horizons doesn’t feel like a game at all. It’s more of a service – an essential. Yes, it’s fundamentally not that exciting when you think for more than a few moments about picking fruit or snagging bugs; yet it’s the kind of thing you just expect to have included with every Nintendo Switch. Because once you’ve played it you sort of can’t imagine not playing it. You’ll struggle to imagine a morning, or evening, or afternoon when you haven’t felt that persistent pull to escape to a better place. And a game like that has never come at a better time.

For now, Animal Crossing: New Horizons feels like a no-brainer for fans of the franchise, and a perfect place to start for newcomers—with the exception of ruining every other previous Animal Crossing game, should you ever want to go back to them.

An impressive suite of improvements combine with a more clearly defined structure for Animal Crossing's finest outing to date. [Eurogamer Essential]

Animal Crossing is everything I have been craving: it is gentle, soothing, social and creative, and my group chats are already buzzing with hype about beetles and villager fashions. If there was ever a perfect time for a game such as this, that time is now.

Aurora Island started off as an escape, a way for me to run away from the people and things that were weighing me down. It became so much more than that in just a short amount of time. I found community here. Not a community shackled together by economy or industry, but one connected by mutual compassion. That doesn’t mean everyone is blithely ignorant of reality or brainwashed into mind-numbing positivity, but there’s an undercurrent of tenderness for your fellow animal that inspires each and every action we take. I know life is waiting for me back on the mainland. I know this can’t last forever. But in the meantime, I’m going to absorb as much from my time here as possible in the hopes of taking at least a little bit of Aurora back with me.

The game is relaxing and soothing. That's it's strong suit and it nails it completely, making it easy to sink hours and hours into in a single day...It is without a doubt the best entry in the series yet.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a respite from the current state of the world. I find my general anxiety slowly subside as I run through my town, water my plants, and build furniture for the sassy chicken gentleman living down by the beach. It’s exactly what I need right now. There are moments when I look up from a long session and realize that I’ve been ignoring everything around me. Then I take a look around at what actually is going on around me, and realize that maybe I’d better stay in my island paradise for a little while longer.

I'm notoriously lacking in patience, but Animal Crossing has always had a charm to it that allowed me to tolerate its time wasting bollocks. Considering New Horizons wants you to work just to get to Animal Crossing's usual brand of time wasting bollocks has eliminated that tolerance.

It’s the video game equivalent of a relaxing getaway — and we could all use that kind of respite right now.