My house in Animal Crossing: New Horizons looks like the “guys really live in apartments like this” meme. My landscaping looks like the set of Holes. The host of a Netflix gardening show might issue a begrudging nod toward my patchy garden before they trip on a half-buried tire on their way out and stumble into a bramble of unpruned weeds.
Widely lauded—including by WIRED—as the perfect pastime for this quarantine moment, Animal Crossing: New Horizons must mean to be relaxing. It has the telltale signs: chibi animals talking in high-pitched mumblesqueaks, a lazy island guitar soundtrack, flowers literally everywhere. I can fish on the seaside or chase a blue butterfly. I can dye my hair pink and lay a picnic basket along the river’s edge. There are no threats, except a couple of choice insects, and I can’t even fall off a hillside. Invisible bowling bumpers line each one.
And yet Animal Crossing: New Horizons is relaxing to me the way a high-end Maui resort may be relaxing—the kind where at-attention employees taxi $20 cocktails to your stinging-hot metal beach chair atop 500 truckloads of stolen white sand. I sit out in the sun, getting more and more intoxicated, but nothing stops the stinging, and the bill just keeps getting steeper.
How is it possible to feel so completely unrelaxed in Animal Crossing? I’ve wondered this for hours, pitching my brain against the game’s repetitive dialog, frustrating mechanics, and obsession with debt bondage in search for a lasting dopamine high. And while I’ve enjoyed small, short-lived bursts of joy—a new fish species, a gift dropped from a balloon!—in the end, Animal Crossing has only felt like the grind, charmingly reskinned.
In Animal Crossing, your character purchases a “deserted island package” and leaves the workaday world behind to live on a pristine, naturally beautiful enclave. Once you arrive, a tanuki named Tom Nook, founder and president of Nook Inc., who sold you the package, explains what you can do there to unwind: upgrade your tent into a house, decorate that house, craft tools, mine materials, make furniture. Doing so, he says in what I imagine to be the voice of Gilmore Girls’ Taylor Doose, will help you pay back the steep loan you a