The new Animal Crossing update has revived my pandemic haven | games

nPandemic-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 my kids a New Year’s party in the game, but apart from that, I’ve barely touched my island since the height of lockdown, when sunny Alba was my favorite escape from the monotonous misery of the real world. In that time, I have spent over 200 hours on this island. As I emerged from her (now huge) house, my avatar’s hair was fluffy and her eyes were sleepy after a very long slumber.

I was half expecting Alba to be in ruins, but it’s not that bad. Aside from a few cockroaches in the basement and a handful of weeds sticking out of the snow, everything is as it was. The roads I had drawn around the island still led me to the shop, the tailors, and the museum; I stopped by to visit Owl Blathers, and he gave me a new task of finding a pigeon named Brewster so we could open a museum café. “It’s been four years and eight months!” exclaimed one of my long-time residents, a penguin named Aurora. This can’t be true, right? Have I really been ignoring her since the summer of 2021? Fortunately, Animal Crossing characters are very forgiving. I got the impression they were fine without me.

I took myself on a little tour of Alba, checking out all the things I’d forgotten I’d made. Atop the highest cliffs on the island, I found a half-finished bamboo zen garden. There is a playground on the beach. I had a baby and a toddler in 2020 and was spending a lot Time in the stadiums. The whole place is a testament to how homesick I have become during the pandemic, stuck in a suboptimal basement flat in Brighton: the island flag is a saltire, and the island tune is the first two bars of Scotland’s Brave.

I checked my bank account and there were over 2 million bells there. How the hell did you raise 2 million bells selling fish and fossils? With the help of an additional 99 thousand interest bells, I paid off the last installment of my home loan, forgetting that there was no real meaning to doing so except personal satisfaction. I’m broke now, but at least I’m out of the grip of Tom Nook’s financial empire. That raccoon shark ain’t getting nothing from me now.

There’s a new building: a hotel located at the end of the pier, run by a family of Kappa pirates. Decorating the house has never been my favorite part of Animal Crossing, so I’m never entirely thrilled when I’m asked to create new rooms for guests, but there have been a lot of improvements to this activity since the last time I played – placing cute little pieces of furniture and paintings on the floor and walls is much easier than it was before, especially using the Switch 2 controller as a mouse. I put together a nautical theme for the first room and discovered that the rewards for this work were miniature versions of old Nintendo games and consoles. I start by mentally planning the game room in my house.

Rather than face all of this, some of my friends have abandoned their pandemic-era islands and started over, which involves a level of dedication to the game that I can’t help but respect. There’s a new service — run by Mr. Resetti, the grumpy mole who used to yell at you to stop the game without saving in the Animal Crossing era of the early 2000s — that lets you clear everything from your island’s land, leaving it clear for terraforming and redecoration. It’s also now easier to make those external transformations, as you can press L to stick your character to the invisible island grid, making placing things like walls and roads much easier. Crops were discovered. Did you know that Animal Crossing now has farming? And recipes? This was news to me. Now I make my own little smoothie before my morning walk in Alba.

I’m surprised at how quickly I get back into the rhythm of Animal Crossing. It is a relaxing game, with many creative outlets. A lot of the new things in this update are for people with more time than me – for example, you can decorate all-new Slumber Islands with friends while your avatar sleeps, but what’s always been great about this game is that it doesn’t require a lot of you. You can spend a quiet half hour each day checking out your little world, or you can spend many hours designing custom outfits for residents and tourists, designing every square meter of the island to your specifications.

In the 1990s, Animal Crossing was a game born of loneliness: Nintendo’s Katsuya Iguchi came up with the original idea for the game because his move to Kyoto separated him from his friends and family in Chiba, near Tokyo. He envisioned a game that fostered a sense of community, where families could play together. (By the way, you can read more about the origins of this series in my book about Nintendo — coming out in a couple of weeks.) So it seems pretty poetic that Animal Crossing ended up saving the entire world from loneliness in 2020. It’s taken me a long time to feel good about returning to Alba, and it was a surprise to discover that this game is now better than ever.

What are you playing?

The man I slept with send. I played all eight episodes over the course of a week and have never laughed out loud at a video game. A narrative game in the style of old Telltale adventures The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us, made by many of the same people, it tells the story of superhero Robert Robertson III, who is sent to work in a call center and put in charge of a team of former supervillains in a rehabilitation program. The animation is great, the characters and acting are memorable, and the dialogue is quick-witted. It could have been a great anime series, but it makes for a better video game that focuses on choice. Normally anything superhero related would be an immediate “no” from me, but this is smart and funny without the boring self-deprecating humor that usually plagues the genre.

Available on: PlayStation 5, PC; Nintendo Switch/2 releases coming January 28th
Estimated playing time: 8-9 hours

What are you reading?

• Amazon MGM Studios has released the first image of Game of Thrones actress Sophie Turner as Lara Croft in the upcoming film. Tomb Raider TV series. Angelina Jolie and Alicia Vikander were Croft’s previous on-screen appearances. Turner says she trained eight hours a day, five days a week for the past year for this role.

• New independent site Design Room has delved into the groundbreaking 2008 parkour game Mirror edgean in-depth history written by frequent Guardian Games contributor Lewis Gordon.

• Another online multiplayer game was released last week: the 2019 sci-fi mech shooter Anthemone of the first live service failures of the current era. It is produced by BioWare, a studio best known for RPGs. Its producer Mark Darrah released a four-hour (!) post-mortem video on YouTube, summarized here by VGC.

What to click on

Question block

A few weeks ago I asked about the most anticipated games of 2026 (mine are here). reader any Answered simply with the words Fatal Frame – There’s a remake of the second installment in this popular Japanese ghost photography series coming out in March. Nora I chose The Mermaid Mask – “a funny and creepy point-and-click puzzle” – and TOEM 2, the sequel to the beloved black-and-white photography game. Andrew Look forward to the interesting mix of characters in Resident Evil 9, which stars relatively defenseless newcomer Grace and veteran zombie killer Leon Kennedy.

refrigerator Hoping to get a new 3D Mario game on Switch 2, and so am I – Nintendo usually announces games late, so I think the odds are good. And I’m sorry, MaxBut the odds are it’s not It’s pretty great that this is the year we finally see Half-Life 3, so I can’t share your optimism. I lost so many bets on that game that I gave it up forever.

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