Welcome to The Backlog, a series in which we will take a look back at 12 games from 2020 that, in one way or another, had a lasting impact on the video game industry.
In the first two installments of The Backlog, I looked at games that released in January of 2020. Part of this is because February was a bit of a dead month, and part of it is because I wanted to set the stage. The world was mostly normal that month, though there were already warning signs about the coronavirus. A botched remake of a classic game and a sequel to a long-running franchise ... those were the games that could make waves in a slow period for games. Now, though, we come to March of 2020, where things went off the rails very quickly.
I tend to pinpoint March 11, the day the NBA shut down, as the true start of quarantine. From that moment on, I only really went out of my house for groceries, masks, and all of the things that became very familiar after the coronavirus well and truly arrived. Amidst all of the death and illness, I found myself suddenly with a lot of time by myself. Defector was still a few months away, and though I had a regular weekend freelancing gig, most of my week was spent pitching stories and playing a lot of video games.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons released on March 20, 2020, and if there was a game better suited for the moment, I never found it. What could have been better than a life simulator, at a time when no one had any sort of external life to speak of? As of December 31, 2024, New Horizons is the second-best selling game in Nintendo Switch history—trailing only Mario Kart 8 Deluxe—racking up over 47 million copies sold in under five years. More anecdotally, it felt like everyone I knew either suddenly had a Switch or were in the process of trying to find one during the Great Switch Shortage of 2020, and almost all of those people were playing New Horizons.
What was it about the cutesy and oftentimes repetitive world of Animal Crossing that so captured a bored and scared populace? Let's find out.
What Is It?
At its core, the Animal Crossing series is very simple. You're dropped into a new territory—in New Horizons, that is your own semi-private island—and let loose on the environment. You can chop trees down for wood, pick flowers for decorations, capture bugs for a collection, and fish. Beyond the basic tenets of gameplay, the player is free to do mostly whatever they want to the island. The centerpiece of the game is your house, which you can decorate and build out however you want, though more advanced players broaden their, ahem, horizons and turn a house into a village. All the while, "bells" serve as the main currency for buying outfits, furniture, and other such bits of flair.
It's a simple game to grasp, which perhaps helps explain why it was so popular with gamers and non-gamers alike, but there is a lot of complexity and depth, at least for a time. There are NPC villagers that come to visit and live on your island, and they give you quests to complete and items to add to your hoard. There's also Tom Nook, the capitalist landlord that inspired memes and ire in almost equal parts. There's no losing at Animal Crossing, though, and that's the best part of the game. If I want to play something that challenges me, there are thousands of other games I can pick up, but this series is meant to be a break from that. Sure, there are challenges for perfecting your patch of land, but there's no penalty if you ignore those and focus on creating the best possible virtual home for your little avatar.
What Went Right?
This is a tough question to answer, because the answer is either "almost everything" or "nothing at all."
The best part of New Horizons is the setting. Previous Animal Crossing games had their own signature locations, but none of them topped the aesthetics of a tropical island. I had bounced off previous games in the series after a short amount of time, but something about having a vacation getaway of an island worked for me enough to latch onto the gameplay loop. It also helps that the Switch is much more powerful than the 3DS and previous consoles, so everything has a lovely shine to it, in high definition.
With regards to the gameplay loop, the biggest change in New Horizons gave the player even more control. In previous games, villagers that came to share in your plot of land would just build their houses wherever they wanted. It drove me insane when I had a plan for a bit of land only to see someone move in right on top of it. In New Horizons, you are able to pick where their houses will be built, as well as where the shop and museum, two of the game's central hubs, pop up. This allows for some inch-by-inch urban planning, which maybe isn't exactly what Animal Crossing is about—that aspect reminds me more of Stardew Valley, where constructing a beautifully organized farm is half the fun—but it was a welcome addition. You can also terraform the island, which adds yet another level of control by allowing the player to shift mountains and rivers to their liking.
Other than those blockbuster additions, New Horizons just gets the Animal Crossing formula right, and there's value in that, even if it's not the most exciting evolution of the series. All the actions feel snappy and impactful, and it's easy to lose hours getting every bit of furniture built, arranged, and polished to your liking. More importantly, this game offered the the right thing at just the right time: an escape.
What Went Wrong?
I haven't mentioned multiplayer yet, and this is where some of the problems started for New Horizons. Nintendo is infamously terrible at online implementation and has been for as long as I can remember, and this game was no different. Multiplayer is a big part of Animal Crossing. You can trade pretty much everything with other players, and their islands might have, say, different fruit than yours, so visiting their land to collect items you can't find on your island is a big part of the appeal. Upon launch, perhaps due to Nintendo underestimating the amount of players or simply because their online systems are never all that good, it was very difficult to get into a friend's game in order to visit their island. I personally had disconnects, lag, and errors throughout my experience in March of 2020, which was a real bummer, given that this was one of the few ways to interact with people outside of my apartment. Once the initial rush passed, it got better, but it left a sour taste in my mouth.
Still, though, that was a temporary problem. The bigger issue with New Horizons is one of its biggest strengths: it's just more Animal Crossing, and that comes with the weight of expectations. New Horizons may have given the player more control, and a beautiful setting, but it's not quite fleshed out in the way previous games were. There are basic features from the series that either don't appear in New Horizons, or simply aren't implemented well. Villagers aren't quite as interactive as before, and they run out of interesting things to say much quicker. There wasn't a cafe, a lovely feature from the series' past, and there are no mini-games (in New Leaf, a previous game in the series, you could buy a gaming console and play mini-games on it). The list goes on and on, and people have compiled the missing content even after a year-plus worth of updates.
Were People Normal About This Game?
Could anyone truly be normal in March of 2020? Probably not, and I'd say the response to New Horizons far outweighed what was in the game, both in the positive and negative directions. The initial reviews were all stellar, but I'm not sure how much of that was looking through lockdown-colored glasses. Not to pick on a specific reviewer, but the Kotaku review is a good example: There's certainly an opinion on the game, but the vacation log format felt a bit like quarantine mania manifesting as a review of the game.
I can't blame anyone for getting carried away, though; it really was a hard time, and New Horizons was an escape from that. On the other end of the spectrum, Animal Crossing veterans were disappointed in the missing features, and reading the posts from back then, it felt like this new game wasn't so much for fans of the series, but potential new converts. That's well and good, and it mostly succeeded, but I'm never a fan of games that abandon foundational work in order to simplify things for a casual audience. That audience has value, but they are not the ones who kept playing the game long after we could go back outside.
Overall, though, I think the general tenor of reactions for New Horizons was a nice balm. I personally loved seeing all of the memes and stories that people shared of how their time on the island was going, and if the price to pay for that was a game that maybe wasn't as good as it could have been, then that seems fine enough to me.
What's Happened Since?
New Horizons had a sturdy release calendar of content for about 18 months. From March of 2020 to November of 2021, Nintendo updated the game adding features and events that kept the game feeling fresh for long enough to bridge the gap between lockdown and some sense of normalcy. (That's not to say things got better by November 2021; we're still living in the COVID era, and with every spike in infections comes a reminder of how bad it has gotten over the last five years.) The final free update, 2.0, added in some of the features that were missing from the base game; the cafe came back, you could now cook different food, there were boat tours, and other minor but impactful additions added up to a decent bit of changes.
Since that update, though, Nintendo has mostly abandoned New Horizons. The last bug fix for the game was a year later, in November 2022, and there hasn't been any additional content. New Horizons was an 18-month experience and little more than that, and there's barely any reason to come back to the game if you played it plenty at release. There are still people playing it, of course; gamers who love a particular series will return to it many times. But it does appear that Nintendo is moving on to perhaps the next Animal Crossing, which will likely launch sometime after the Switch 2 releases at some point in 2025. New Horizons came out three years into the original Switch's life, though, and if that same rhythm is kept for the sixth mainline game in the series, Animal Crossing fans would have to wait until 2028 to embark on a new adventure. Who even knows what the world will look like then?
Is It Worth Playing In 2025?
If you haven't played New Horizons at all, then it's as good a time as any to dive in. While the content may have stalled out and disappointed release-day players and series fans, there's plenty to do to validate the tens or hundreds or thousands of hours you can put into the game at your own leisure. I'd say it rates at a 9.2 on the Defector Replayability Ability Scale for new players. However, if you did play New Horizons at launch, and especially if you kept with the game through all of its updates over the following 18 months, then there's little new to see if you were to fly back to the island. The game is what it is at this point, and what it has been for over three years, and so I would rate Animal Crossing: New Horizons at a 4.3 on the Defector Replayability Ability Scale for those who have already experienced most of what it has to offer.
