Category: Reviews

Rather than including all of its key features right out of the gate, Animal Crossing: New Horizons grants players access to places and abilities over time following the completion of new tasks that become available day by day.

That said, new players are nonetheless required to make a few big decisions within the first hour or so of gameplay. Among these is where to place your villager’s tent. Since the entirety of the island isn’t yet accessible, there’s only limited real estate on which to place your home relative to the entirety of your new island. While not available at the start of the game, the option to move your home does in fact become possible over the course of developing the island.

Unlocking Infrastructure Changes

You can move your home by talking to Tom Nook in the Resident Services office and selecting a dialogue option “Let’s talk infrastructure.” In order for this option to become available in the first place, the Resident Services office must be upgraded from a tent to a full-size building.

To get to that point, you must first pay off your first home loan, open the Nook’s Cranny shop, build your island’s first bridge and welcome three new villagers into their new homes. Then Resident Services will automatically undergo a renovation, after which Tom Nook is willing to talk to you about moving buildings around the island.

How to Move Your Home

After letting Tom Nook know about your interest in island infrastructure, select “About my home…” and then ask to relocate it. Nook will ask for 30,000 Bells in order to do so. While not an insignificant sum, the ability to move other buildings like the museum or other villagers’ homes also becomes available at this time, and moving those will run 50,000 Bells.

Selecting your home’s new location works just like choosing a spot for a new building. Tom Nook will provide you with a kit that can be placed onto eligible terrain (meaning not too close to the edge of a cliff or body of water). Once that’s in place, your home will be relocated the next day.

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Another month, another batch of fish to catch in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Hopefully you’ve been able to land the elusive Stringfish and Sturgeon, as they — along with several others — are leaving the island waters. However, they’ll be replaced with plenty of new fish, even if they aren’t quite as exciting.

March was an incredible month for fishing in New Horizons, with cool creatures of all sizes lurking in the waters. This month sees the addition of ten new fish — some of which are worth a lot of Bells. Both freshwater and saltwater species are represented in April, so no matter your preference you have a lot a catch. Here’s the complete list of new fish coming to Animal Crossing: New Horizons in April. The following list is for islands in the Northern Hemisphere (Southern Hemisphere locales will be slightly different).

Found in the Ocean all day. The popular fish can be caught by fishing for tiny shadows, but only nets 650 Bells each. Just don’t call it Nemo.

5 Surgeonfish

Found in the Ocean all day. Look for small shadows if you hope to find one and sell them for 1,000 Bells each.

4 Butterfly Fish

Found in the Ocean all day. This small-shadowed fish is also worth 1,000 Bells.

3 Seahorse

Found in the Ocean all day. This adorable creature can be reeled in by casting out towards a tiny shadow and is valued at 1,100 Bells.

2 Guppy

Found in Rivers during the morning. The boring fish is indicated by a tiny shadow yet sells for 1,300 Bells. As plain is it may be, it’s actually a good catch if you’re hoping to earn some Bells.

1 Snapping Turtle

Found in Rivers at night, these valuable reptiles have an extra large shadow. If you manage to reel one in, you’re looking at 5,000 Bells. It’s not quite a fish, but it’s still an awesome addition for the month of April.

The most exciting fish isn’t really a fish at all — it’s a reptile! Anglers who cast out their line in rivers have a chance of reeling in a Snapping Turtle worth 5,000 Bells. The Guppy is the next most valuable fish, coming in at 1300 Bells. These new fish — and other aquatic creatures — are active at various times of day, so regardless of when you play there will be something fun to snag on the other end of your line.

If you missed some of the fish that left at the beginning of this month, don’t worry! They’ll come back around at some point. Or, you could always adjust the date on your Nintendo Switch and perform a bit of time traveling. Either way, March’s fish will swim across your path at some point in the future.

Until then, there are plenty of cool new fish to hook.

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The future of Beth’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons island is uncertain. “My sister and I are not managing,” she told me over Twitter DM.

Everything breaks down without some rules. Animal Crossing: New Horizons can be a deeply intimate game for its players, who often have years of history and expectations for the space. Sharing an island is like sharing a home, bringing folks together in close quarters.

In Animal Crossing: New Horizons, players are on a deserted island that they’re to fill out with animals and shops and decorations, but if they’re playing with another player, that means sharing it all — except the in-game home. Players will each get one of those for themselves. Keeping the peace on the island means respecting boundaries, even ones that are unspoken.

Say, for instance, you’re sharing an island with your partner and they’ve grabbed the Nintendo Switch before you can. They’ve visited Timmy and Tommy at Nook’s Cranny, and bought up all the good stuff — the one-time purchases — at the shop. Next thing you know, someone’s been voted off the island. For Beth and her sister Natalie, the trouble started with a misunderstanding: that they’d both have their own separate islands.

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“Crying and angry, she threatened to delete my island,” Beth said. And she did. Beth’s island got voted off the Nintendo Switch. They’re not alone: There are a bunch of people on Twitter who’ve posted about similar situations — family feuds over who’s starting the island.

One player said another deleted their character because they put their tent too close to another. A few parents told me their kids were torturing each other in game by placing their tents as close as possible to their siblings — the in-game equivalent of I’m not touching her!

The challenge in Animal Crossing: New Horizons is that there’s no other option for households with a single Nintendo Switch system and multiple Animal Crossing players; if you don’t want to share an island, you’ve got to buy a second console.

The one-island-per-Switch rule has caused some controversy with players. The first person to join the island controls everything, and the second (and others) follows along — meaning their progress is gated behind that of the main player. If the primary player never donates the first five creatures to Tom Nook, Blathers will never show up and the ax won’t be unlocked for other players. And what fun is Animal Crossing without an ax?

Image: Nintendo EPD/Nintendo via Polygon

Couples and families that want to get around these restrictions have to buy a second device — and many of the players I spoke to have. But some have chosen to stick with a single island for a bunch of reasons; some can’t justify the cost of another Nintendo Switch and another copy of Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Plenty of others, too, simply want to share an island, an extension of their real lives with their partners. There are limitations, of course — but the game lets players choose how they play.

Antonio Di Benedetto told Polygon that he and his girlfriend, Pam Ren, are sharing an island, and they’ll share their island duties as they do in the house they own together. “We’ll work together and coordinate, with her awesome design sense and taste taking the lead and dictating the creative direction of our layouts [and] furniture selections […] while I follow her advice and offer my support through my input, shared love for minimal, modern aesthetics, and supplement with what strengths I have,” Di Benedetto said.

People like playing games together — even single-player games that don’t encourage multiplayer, games researcher Dr. Mia Consalvo told Polygon. She’s researched the act of “tandem play,” in which her team observed people playing together.

Image: Nintendo EPD/Nintendo via Antonio Di Benedetto

“Different game elements drive different reactions and play responses, but they all would try to accommodate their partner in various ways to make the experience more enjoyable for each other,” she said. “Sometimes they also ended up playing in a game that they normally would not — doing an ‘evil’ playthrough, reading less text, taking less time making an avatar — because they valued the joint experience more than the details of what they were doing. If they were couples, they would also bring in their histories and play styles.”

Ren is decorating her own house — even if players are sharing an island, they get two separate houses — as if it’s both of theirs, Di Benedetto said. “[It’s] just like how we collaborate on our own real house design decisions,” he said. She’s consulting with Di Benedetto on her own house, making her bedroom their bedroom.

There are cat beds “symbolically” placed for their real-life cats. The only real problem — a minor one, Di Benedetto said — is that the co-op is limited. To play together means always sharing the same screen, with one player controlling most of the experience.

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“Lots of online games have allowed us to share our spaces with friends and partners,” Consalvo said, “both to hand out together and to show off for one another. [Animal Crossing: New Horizons] is another example of that kind of game. Because the variations are so broad in terms of what one can collect and create this makes sharing [and] showing off particularly interesting.”

It’s because of the limitations that people are willing to purchase separate Nintendo Switches to have their own spaces. Animal Crossing fan Spenser Powell told me he went out and got his partner, a non-gamer, a Switch Lite when she expressed interest in it.

“I didn’t want anyone touching my island,” Powell said. “I feel like Animal Crossing is a place for someone to escape everything, almost like a safe space. And while I certainly love having visitors, I wouldn’t want a permanent one who will play when I’m not on the island.”

Image: Nintendo EPD/Nintendo via Polygon

Powell said his partner is now hooked on the game. The other day, she told him she wished she could get paid for her real job in Nook Miles, he said. With two Switches, they don’t have to worry about physically sharing the same system.

The thing that makes Animal Crossing versatile for even these players, though, is that they can play separately and together; having separate islands might even bring couples together in new ways. Spending time apart makes the time together different, in-game: There’s a certain kind of joy in showing off this intimate, personal space to another person.

The fear of having to trust another person, even a partner, with the intimate space of an island is very real for some players, though. Especially if the other player is playing differently than you. “I split the island in half with a river,” New Horizons player Amber Corum told me about sharing with her boyfriend Lukas. “My boyfriend is chaotic and I can’t have that on my half of our island.

“We both have very different approaches to Animal Crossing,” she said. “I have more of a traditional style and he likes to push the limits.”

They shared a town in Animal Crossing: City Folk, and he had an entire floor of a house “as a holodeck.” The rest of the house was filled with gyroids. (Gyroids are limited in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, but were weird furniture items in other games. Weirdly enough, they are also characters in the game — in New Horizons, I’ve met Lloid, who guards my bridge-in-progress while he collects donations.)

“His favorite items are pitfalls, and he loves to block his villagers that are his ‘enemies’ with booby traps and trees,” Corum said. “All to say, he thrives in seeing how chaotic and quirky his town could be.” Oh, and he’s deemed the town’s song “All Star” by Smash Mouth.

Image: Nintendo EPD/Nintendo via Amber Corum

On his side of the island, Lukas has begun decorating already: He’s built room full of gnomes, including a custom-made gnome wallpaper. It’s … jarring. Corum said she’s considering a “neutral zone” where they can share access to shops and the like.

This separation is important. “Real feelings can get hurt through virtual avatars or actions and when couples don’t agree on the seriousness — or not — of virtual actions, there is a lot of room for misunderstanding, hurtfulness, and arguments,” Dr. Sarah Evans, assistant professor of digital humanities and new media at Molloy College, told Polygon. “I think people commonly assume there is a huge gap between ‘real life’ and gameplay or stuff we do in games but there really isn’t.”

Dozens of Animal Crossing: New Horizons players reached out to me with their own stories about sharing an island or playing with friends, family, or partners. Most were excited about having a space to share — whether they were playing separately or apart. But the thing that was common across any of these stories was boundaries: Each of these groups of players had them, some strict and others very laid back. But boundaries they were, still.

After all, no one wants to be the one voted off the island. With a system in place, things have settled down on Beth and Natalie’s new island, Ö… hungie.

“I have noticed that a lot of crafting recipes are either much harder or impossible to get,” Beth said. “We’ve worked out a system where I log onto her account to craft those things and log back into mine, but it is still pretty inefficient. Ah, well.”

She continued: “Peace has come to Ö… hungie. At last.”

Switch Lite

Nintendo Switch consoles are often sold out, but you can still pick up the handheld-only Switch Lite, which is perfect for portable gaming.

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