Animal Crossing’s Happy Home Paradise is the best thing that has happened to New Horizons. He appeals perfectly to the two main factions of the ACNH player base – “I haven’t played in ages and I’m too overwhelmed to go back” and “I still play all the time and I desperately have need something to do “. Happy Home Paradise acts like a hard reset, but it keeps your real island intact. Instead of forcing you to lose all of your progress, it navigates you to a new archipelago where you can fill each plot of land with a vacation home and decorate it to match the tastes of a separate villager. When I first played the expansion, I explained how its encouragement to tailor each design to a specific villager rekindled my love for the game after my own home became a cluttered mess, but after built a few more houses, the DLC also rekindled something else – my anxiety.

Animal Crossing is a game that you are meant to play at your own pace, but being happy and content is for the losers. You can have ten villagers on your main island, and when I first played the game I hit rocks, chopped down trees, dug up fossils, planted bells, and fished all day in order to make sure to have these ten villagers on my island as quickly as possible. No terraforming, no design, no fun of any kind was to be tolerated until I had a full complement of villagers. Happy Home Paradise, as awesome as it is, brings that feeling back.

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I started Happy Home Paradise with Lottie by assigning Eloise an island – a secluded little piece of land just off the coast of our main office. I made the decoration, we shook hands, the end. After that, I was able to choose the villager to whom I wanted to offer a house and I had the added pressure of choosing the land to give them, as well as designing the garden in addition to the interior. It only made it better, allowing me to give Tybalt his own little batting cage near a waterfall. This was followed by giving Snooty a pool house in a pretty lot by a lake, giving Alli an autumn hut for mushroom hunting, and building Pudge a basalt kingdom with a golden throne. to fit the backrest of a “pretentious palace”.

These are the things that make Happy Home Paradise great. It’s fun to decide whether the money-lover and lazy little one would prefer a pool table in blue or red to match his ostentatious house lined with golden safes on the back wall. Sneaking into a mushroom table next to the comfy white birch bed for Alli is a delight – realizing that you can place an encyclopedia on top and light it with a mushroom lamp is even better.

Of course, there is still a lot to fill out, but there is too much to worry about – it’s not an achievable number like ten, so the game encourages you to take your time. I can’t fill all of these bundles right now, so what’s the rush? Once I narrow down to a handful of vacant spaces, I’ll probably feel the need to rush out, but in the meantime? No, let’s relax. Or at least that’s what I thought.

Back at the office, Lottie escorts me to an abandoned building nearby and tells me it could be a school – if only I sold more vacation homes. What sick and twisted mental game is this? Not only am I paid in hard currency which I can only spend in the office gift shop, but now I am guilty of denying children their education. The school is not the only empty building either. As I strolled around the island, watching Lottie walk carefree back to the offices, the magnitude of the task dawned on me. For every few houses I built, a new building would be unlocked.

This means it’s not just a tucked away beach paradise that I’ll never see waiting for me to get to work – it’s the building next door as well. Now I have to build all the houses as fast as possible, otherwise all the children will be deprived of an education – given that the three children in the game (Timmy, Tommy and Daisy Mae) all seem to violate child labor. laws, it is crucial that the school is built. And what’s the next step, health care? Aside from the drugs for a bee sting, it’s rare, so maybe it’s my fault too.

I love Happy Home Paradise, and when I’m done, I’ll feel a little nostalgic that there aren’t many more people to conquer. But as long as they are vacant, I cannot relax. What if there’s a fire and it’s my fault that we don’t have a fire station?

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