Animal Crossing celebrates its first birthday with falling stars evening swims and friendship

My experience with the pandemic began on March 19, 2020, when my husband and I returned to Ottawa from Glasgow and were forced to endure 14 days of mandatory quarantine. The mailbox greeted me when I got home, and among the items in it was a package from a dear friend, with the note: to keep your mind occupied so that your heart can rest. It was equipped with a Switch Lite.

I'd never had a gaming console of my own prior to this purchase with animal crossing bell. I'd never purchased a big-name game before, and the price tags on the majority of the titles that were recommended to me turned me off. Nonetheless, within a few days, I'd invested in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, as well as a monthly Nintendo Online subscription so that I could visit the islands of my much cooler friends, and the value I've derived from those investments has been immeasurable.

Animated cartoon fantasy in which conflicts between villagers are easily resolved with gifts and the only things that can physically harm you are stinging insects, ACNH is an escapist escape from everyday life. When you were playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons in the spring of 2020, you were acutely aware of the extent to which everyone else was also playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons — and, ironically, of the extent to which people weren't so much trying to escape reality as they were propagating it into the fantasy.

Articles on the economics of ACNH, Sow Jones' Stalk Market, enterprising sex workers who make money by hitting people with butterfly nets, debt and millennials, and the increasingly unrealistic dream of home ownership were written. Shing Yin Khor made headlines when they brought famous art installations to their island and recreated them. On Twitter, epidemiology news was punctuated by the bright candy colors of nook mile tickets as people snapped pictures of sunsets, their goofy animal neighbors, and their beaches littered with fragments of fallen stars during a few merciful weeks.

Despite the fact that ACNH is a fantasy game, the realism of its foley artistry and the meticulous curation of the game's soundscapes are the game's most miraculous achievements in my opinion. In contrast to the incomprehensible approximations of their textual dialogue that the game's animal-people speak — which is similar to hearing language in a dream — and the upbeat soundtrack, which makes funny noises when you are attacked by wasps or bitten by mosquitoes, the sounds of your character moving physically through the island are astonishingly immersive. It makes a difference whether you're wearing sandals or boots, walking on grass or flagstones or bricks, walking on wood or sand, or walking on arched tiles how the sound of your footfall sounds. Although the visual cues are cartoonish, the realism of the sound translates the green triangles of grass into a texture that is vividly experienced.

However, I don't believe I fully comprehended or appreciated the granularity of this sound design until the summer, when they added a swimming mechanic to the gameplay.