Animal Crossing's Happy Home Paradise is the best thing to happen to New Horizons. It perfectly appeals to the two main factions of the ACNH playerbase - 'I haven't played in ages and I'm too overwhelmed to go back' and 'I still play all the time and desperately need something to do'. Happy Home Paradise acts like a hard reset, but it keeps your actual island intact. Instead of forcing you to lose all of your progress, it sees you set sail for a new archipelago where you can fill every plot of land with a vacation home and decorate it to match a distinct villager’s tastes. When I first played the expansion, I wrote about 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 building a few more houses, the DLC has also rekindled something else - my anxiety.
Animal Crossing is a game you're supposed to play at your own pace, but being happy and content is for losers. You can have ten villagers on your main island, and when I first played the game, I hit rocks, chopped trees, dug up fossils, planted Bells, and fished all the livelong day in order to make sure I'd get those ten villagers on my island as fast as possible. No terraforming, no designing, no fun of any kind was to be tolerated until I had a full complement of villagers. Happy Home Paradise, as great as it is, brings that sensation back.
I started Happy Home Paradise with Lottie assigning Eloise an island - a small, isolated lump of land just off the coast of our main office. I did the decorating, we shook hands, the end. After this, I got to choose the villager I wanted to offer a home to, and had the added pressure of choosing which piece of land to give them, as well as designing the garden in addition to the interior. This only made it better though, allowing me to give Tybalt his own little batting cage by a waterfall. This was followed by giving Snooty a pool house in a nice lot by a lake, offering Alli an autumnal hut for researching mushrooms, and building Pudge a basalt kingdom with a golden throne to fit the brief of a 'pretentious palace'.
These are the things that make Happy Home Paradise great. It's fun to decide whether the lazy, money loving cub would prefer a snooker table in blue or red to match his ostentatious home lined with golden safes on the back wall. Squeezing in a toadstool table next to the homely, white birch bed for Alli is a delight - realising you can place an encyclopedia on top and light it with a mushroom lamp is even better.
Sure, there are still a lotta lots to fill, but there's too many to be anxious about - it's not an attainable number like ten, so the game encourages you to take your time. I can’t possibly fill all these lots right now, so what’s the rush? Once I get it down to just a handful of vacant spaces, I'll probably feel the need to rush, but in the meantime? Nah, let's just chill. Or at least, that's what I thought.
Back in the office, Lottie escorts me to an abandoned building nearby and tells me it could be a school - if only I sold more holiday homes. What sick, twisted mind game is this? Not only am I paid in currency I can only spend in the office gift shop, I'm now being guilted into denying children of their education. The school is not the only empty building either. As I wandered around the island, watching Lottie skip carefree back to the offices, the size of the task dawned on me. For every few homes I built, a new building would be unlocked.
That means it isn't just some beach paradise tucked out of the way that I'll never see waiting for me to get to work - it's the building next door too. Now I need to build all the homes as fast as I can, otherwise all of the children will go without an education - considering the three children in the game (Timmy, Tommy, and Daisy Mae) all seem to be in violation of child labour laws, it's crucial that the school be built. And what's next, healthcare? Aside from medicine for a bee sting, that's in short supply, so maybe that's all my fault too.
I love Happy Home Paradise, and when I've filled up every lot, I'm going to feel a little wistful that there are no more worlds to conquer. But while they remain vacant, I just can't relax. What if there's a fire and it's my fault we don't have a fire station?