Image: Nintendo
The release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons couldn’t have been better timed, very specifically for me. The Christmas before, my partner bought me a Switch, and for about a decade before that, the only console I’d owned was a modded Wii because I’d sold the roughly two dozen systems I’d collected in an effort to reset my relationship with gaming.
But there was also the fact that just days before, I was furloughed from my job at a brewery because of a pandemic and businesses throughout my city had shut down. I spent hundreds of hours paying Tom Nook his blood money, gaming the turnip market and carefully laying out my island, complete with a theme park and a Halloween land. My partner played, too, and after a short while, I bought her a…
