Hey, let’s talk about Mitzi the cat, and about how Animal Crossing: New Horizons abandoned the series’ origins to promote player expression through control.

In my original Animal Crossing town, Mitzi was my favorite villager. I liked Bunnie and Punchy, too, but Mitzi was my favorite. I eventually learned that a new friend of mine had the game as well, so one day I visited his town.

Now, in addition to having to plug both memory cards into one Gamecube, visiting another town in the original AC meant that a random villager from one town could immediately move to the other. And, wouldn’t you know it, when I got back to my town, Mitzi was gone.

I cried. I was devastated. I never visited another town again. People will often praise games that move them to tears, but I’m pretty sure they don’t mean like this.

Still, the original Animal Crossing did something that I think New Horizons is incapable of doing: It gave the villagers agency, that they may act outside the player’s control and feel believable and alive.

New Horizons does everything it can to make you feel like you’re in control, and indeed you are; the placement of every building, the decision to allow a new villager onto the island, even the landscape itself are all up to the player’s discretion. The entire progression of the game serves to let players handle things how they want and express themselves.

In the original AC, the primary objective is to make enough money to pay off your debt, with side goals of scoring high marks with the Happy Room Academy for displaying complete furniture sets and of completing the museum. There aren’t really any shortcuts to these, as the only way to earn Bells or acquire things to donate is settling into the daily routine of fishing, foraging, and so on. You could try selling turnips, but whereas in New Horizons it’s easy enough to hop on someone else’s island when they have a good price, in AC even if you did have access to multiple towns you’d give up a villager to make the trip.

The only consistent option for achieving the primary goal was to engage with AC as a lifestyle game – jump on for a bit each day, make steady and measurable progress, enjoy the occasional seasonal events, savor the mundanity.

This ultimately aligns well with the game’s core conceit: You’re moving into an existing town when you boot up a fresh save, joining what is supposed to be an existing community. As the original English commercials emphasized, the game is designed to feel like a living world that keeps going whether you’re playing or not, which makes your town feel alive and makes the residents feel like they have agency, and you can’t simply binge it for a few days to generate all the cash you need.

New Horizons, on the other hand, positions improving the island as the main goal. The literal main quest line to entice K.K. Slider to the island culminates in raising your island’s rating, to which all the previous quest activities (inviting more villagers and building buildings) happen to contribute, and your own house is largely irrelevant towards that end.

Critically, since the biggest rewards and goals in New Horizons are terraforming and placing new bridges or exterior features, nothing in the game dares to make any meaningful changes to the state of the island in the absence of the players. Villagers feel like toys, living wherever you decide they should be and just as likely to do some fun activity of their own accord as they are to drop everything at your appearance so they can give you a new chair to put out on the island if you want to but hey, if not, that’s cool too! If someone wants to move in or out, they will make certain that you have had the chance to vet their decision first. If you feel like shuffling some buildings around, say the word and Nook will make it happen.

This also causes some weird metaphors with the deserted island setting. I’m sure not qualified to do a deep dive into the role of capitalism in New Horizons, but suffice it to say that when it offers an infinite supply of definitely uninhabited islands to extract resources from (“uninhabited” aside from all the bugs and fish, but they don’t count, except for when they do) without any regard for the consequences, I’m just a little troubled. And let’s not get into the weird gray markets players have made for trading villagers who are ready to move out (and the scramble after launch to learn how to force certain animals to move out), such that players can easily exchange animals they dislike or find ugly for those more in line with their sensibilities.

Note that this behavior would be unacceptable if you believe the villagers to be real characters making their own decisions, but if they only exist as objects, toys to be dressed up and played with, then it would be more reasonable.

The post Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Gaining Control appeared first on Sketch House Games Blog.

I will never again make a game with characters who have knees.

Looking at modern video games, there is a mind-boggling amount of time spent making 3D characters feel cohesive with the worlds they inhabit to avoid breaking immersion. Inverse kinematics, animation lerping, idle fidgets, facial expressions…there’s a whole host of little details to nail, and nothing shatters verisimilitude like the player character’s cool dress clipping through her giant sword.

But folks, that’s all very hard. Even after animating an entire game, the most basic rigging and IK tasks still prove esoteric and frustrating. I targeted an N64-era aesthetic in hopes of reducing my workload for these technical tasks, but I overlooked a critical characteristic of early 3D games: Expectations and hardware were different in the ‘90s, so even when animation and rendering details were visible at 240p on a CRT TV, they would go unnoticed by most players. Consequently, their developers necessarily opted to cast aside unnecessary details in favor of tightening their aesthetics.

I don’t think I’m injecting too much intentionality through hindsight here. Sure, perhaps character animations needed to be exaggerated just to be understandable at low resolution, but that also made them more expressive. Yes, objects needed bright colors and clear silhouettes so they didn’t all blur together, but that’s just good visual design.

Fittingly, Kirby 64 is still one of the best-looking games out there. The use of colorful backdrops populated by abstract shapes and patterns reflects the playful nature of the franchise, while also cleanly evoking a sense of each location without getting bogged down in the details of actually rendering it accurately. Enemies are often little more than colored 3D shapes, carefully selected and dramatically animated for an intuitive a sense of how they move and what powers Kirby might absorb from them. Kirby and his friends never speak (aside from Kirby’s adorable cries when injured or excited), yet the game’s wordless cutscenes effortlessly convey the whimsical drama driving them forward.

The level of visual abstraction is sublimely balanced; details that matter most are given color and emotion while superfluous details are discarded. Reflecting on it recently, it bears some interesting similarities to Impressionist art.

The Impressionist movement in art was one of deprioritizing detail in favor of overall feel or flow, less about capturing verbatim a scene or a moment and more about reflecting its essence, its impression. A tree need not be painted to look visually realistic when the artist can skillfully compose a deeper, abstractly realistic portrayal of a tree, evoking what a tree truly is beyond its mere appearance.

Similarly, Kirby 64 often elaborates on plain setpieces with abstraction. The clean grassy fields of Kirby’s home planet are littered with checkerboard boxes and green pyramids, not to depict literal objects but to simply evoke the sense of the planet itself. Later, there’s a delightful mall-like level consisting of vignette rooms, each of which clearly reflects a specific scene – a furniture shop, an electronics store, a storage room – using only what explicit features are necessary, with haphazard shapes filling in the rest.

Additionally, Impressionist paintings highlight their own artificiality; look closely and the individual brush strokes are laid bare, the hand of the artist manifested in the work. Impressionist paintings are in part a celebration of themselves, revelry in the craft and techniques that produced them.

Kirby 64 is no different in this regard. Kirby bounds and bounces past enemies who stretch and skew alongside him, with exaggerated animations that make clear the computation driving them but also express energy and joy with even simple movements. His attacks are huge and evocative, with flaming phoenixes and electrified boulders that clip through objects without a care. And, how does Kirby enter each stage? He and his friends huddle together in a plaid void, with a simple prop or two to evoke the theme of the world, and the sense of joy and adventure is palpable as he runs off-screen with a wave and a cheery “bye!”

Details are omitted or ignored because they don’t matter, and what remains is engineered to reflect an emotion, an essence. Kirby 64 is simply a cute, cheery game, and it is also a simply cute, simply cheery, simply gamey game. At every step, it is a distillation of the inherent joy of playing a game and having a good time, making every oversight, hardware limitation, or technical hiccup melt away.

I mean, can you even imagine Kirby with knees?

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