With the Nintendo Switch 2 update to Animal Crossing: New Horizons, I can finally return to the island I made during the pandemic: New Jersey. Was that name a dumb idea? Yes. Was just about every decision I made during the early days of the pandemic a dumb idea? Also, yes! I was so bored back then that I staged a fight between different condiment bottles, so naming a fake town after the Kevin Smith state didn’t seem that far off the beaten path. Either way, we’re back to the digging up priceless fossils and selling them on the black market business!
But there is one problem with returning to this island after five years. Not the giant roaches in my home. I grew up in Florida. That’s built into the deal. Nor the weeds everywhere. Picking those up makes me feel like I’m accomplishing something in my life while accomplishing less in my life than I have in the last ten years.
What’s really getting to me – something I forgot from other Animal Crossing games – is that every single person on my island knows I’ve been gone. When I saw them again, multiple had a variant on the same response: “Whoa! You’ve been gone four years and ten months!” Fortunately, my town looks the same as it did before because I assume my disappearance put the city in a state of shock.
They left my bedroom looking exactly the way it did when I left, cry emoji, prayer emoji, cry emoji. That said, I’m kind of curious what the other animals/people/fictional characters on my island thought was happening while I was gone for five years. And I’ve got a few theories:
I Was Dead
That’s the most obvious one. We’re living on an island surrounded by ocean. Even worse, half of the way I make money is going into the deepest parts of the water, diving, and fighting to capture an octopus swimming as fast as it can. For all they knew I drowned while fishing. Or perhaps a tree fell on my head and Tom Nook didn’t need the attention from the cops due to some work he does under the table.
One animal once gave me a gift for another animal and I opened it anyway and stole the contents. I’d murder someone for doing that. Maybe they murdered me. I could see suspicion flowing around the island as everyone accuses everyone else – that is, until my triumphant return!
I Had A Secret Family On Another Island
Fun fact: my grandfather did the whole ‘going out for a pack of cigarettes’ thing when my mom was ten. And, yeah, he never came back. So maybe the animals on the island saw that darkness inside me. Lord knows I’ve got the damage! Lord knows I’ve got the issues! And I’ve spent a lot of time around these people, so perhaps as I started to visit the island less, they started to make assumptions.
Highguard’s Failure Shouldn’t Matter This Much
Highguard has become a talking point for gaming artistry, instead of just a generic shooter that’s not as good as Apex Legends.
Where else would I go if not living in a house that I’m able to decorate as both an under-the-sea paradise and Egyptian tomb? To hang out with other animals I like more on other islands. But that wasn’t true either. And I hope to repair the relationships with the animals who assumed this.
Witness Protection Program
The whole town lives in fear of Tom Nook. We all know that. 68,000 bells for a guitar? 1,800,000 bells for a slightly bigger storage unit? It’s all graft, all the way down. Tom Nook is filling his pockets with the bells I had to pull out of a tree myself. Why doesn’t he have a home on the island? Where does he go?
Since I was the only person on the island to ever even fly anywhere, perhaps they thought I’d ratted Nook out to the cops and was hiding before I got a freshly-crafted stone axe to the back of the head. That would make sense as it seems like Nook kept his head low while I was gone. But here I am and there’s no trial, no matter how much I get threatened by that raccoon.
I Joined A Cult
I could see the animals thinking I joined a cult and busted out of there. Let’s call it a Cult of the Lamb situation. And, look, for a while I had a pentagram I designed in the middle of my island, so perhaps they accidentally took some of the wrong information from that. And because of my real life schedule, I tended to do most of my in-game fishing and yardwork at night. And, to paraphrase Severance, the idea of a night gardner is a little suspicious.
There’s a whole dark ritual mass quality to planting flowers at midnight. Or maybe they thought I joined up with some weirdo sex cult that ended in a mass casualty event. That would explain why nobody entered my house: They thought it was cursed. The careful way the animals talk to me and all the gifts since my absence makes me think that they believe I contain an eldritch power. Which, in terms of deleting the entire game, I do.
I Got Bored And Moved On With My Life In The Real World
The most terrifying idea of all is that everyone in Animal Crossing understands I’m just a human being pretending to be a human being pretending to be friends with animals so they give me new shirts. They know they’re about as real as most of the characters in Expedition 33. They knew that I’d eventually get tired of digging up gold bags and shaking trees for fruit. They sense the painful gaps of time between awakening.
The moment the system is turned off is the equivalent to death for them. Every time I hit the select button, they know that everything they love and everything they value will disappear and they’ll be sent into oblivion. Perhaps for another five years. Perhaps forever. Frozen in time. Trapped. Ones and zeros that felt love and need and want. Begging an abomination in the shape of a little boy to not send them to the cornfield forever like in It’s A Good Life.
This is actually the true one. I don’t like it. It’s horrifying, but this is the accurate reason. But at least that means this scene is about to go down at the next town celebration. KK Slider will point at me and say, “You monster, you. You dirty little monster. You murderer. You think about me. Go ahead, Drucker. You think bad thoughts about me. And maybe some animal in this city plaza, some animal with guts, somebody who’s so sick to death of living in a place like this, and is willing to take a chance, will sneak up behind you and lay something heavy across your skull, and end this once and for all.”
In response, I’ll point and say, “You’re a bad man. You’re a very bad man!”. And then I’ll shut off the system and it’ll all go dark.
- Released
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March 20, 2020
- ESRB
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Everyone / Comic Mischief, Mild Fantasy Violence, Users Interact, In-Game Purchases
- Developer(s)
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Nintendo EPD
- Publisher(s)
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Nintendo
- Engine
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Havok
- Multiplayer
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Online Multiplayer, Local Multiplayer
- Cross-Platform Play
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no
