Megan the bear has just informed me that it has been five years and six months since I last booted up Animal Crossing: New Horizons. In the intervening days, the town has changed a lot. There’s a coffee shop in the museum now (added in New Horizons 2.0), run by a taciturn pigeon named Brewer. A hotel stands over one of the town’s two piers. The first time I visit the resort, Tom Nook immediately ropes me into crafting items to extoll my island’s virtues and helping design rooms in the new hotel.

These are substantive changes from the base game, ones that offer welcome expansions to the sometimes-slight feeling original release. Yet, these changes fundamentally enlarge, rather than change, New Horizon’s design. The game’s recent major update, 3.0, represents a further drift from the frictions and idiosyncrasies that made the Animal Crossing series so beloved in the first place.

Upon launch, New Horizons was somewhat barren, despite all the quality-of-life additions and feature overhauls it brought to the franchise. Standard features of prior games, such as Brewster’s café, gyroids, and Kapp’n’s boat tours, were totally absent. New Horizon’s first major update, released in November 2021, reintroduced most of those features. This 2.0 patch represented a substantial solidifying of the game’s basics, though it wasn’t enough to lure me back in. I’ve written before about my dissatisfaction with New Horizons, and by the time this update rolled around, I was fully put out. Nevertheless, a new update does represent an opportunity to rearrange the game’s pieces. After so long away, I was curious about what New Horizons would feel like in my hands.

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