Ok, so whoever had Thursday night in the pool for “How long it took me to break down and buy the new Animal Crossing game?” wins.

It arrived on Friday.

I managed to get through my work day without opening it.  But once I hit that 8 hour mark, I opened it, borrowed the Martian’s Switch, and started playing.

It’s an Animal Crossing Game.  Which makes me incredibly happy.

The premise is that you’ve agreed to move to a desert island with Nook and some other critters.  You pay off your ticket to the island with “Nook Miles.”  But in the main, there aren’t a lot of surprises in this game for Animal Crossing fans.  It retains the crafting from Pocket Camp, only more directly.  You can still shake trees for bells, random furniture items, and tree branches (a crafting ingredient).  You can use a flimsy axe to cut three different types of wood from the trees, wood, hard wood and soft wood.

You can craft a lot of things.

Blathers shows up to open a museum, which doesn’t open until tomorrow for me.  So I have a whole lot of bug cages and fish tanks sitting around my tent.

If you’ve played the other games, it’s super intuitive, and even the stuff that isn’t, you can figure out with a minimum of poking around.

Honestly, the timing is pretty brilliant.  I will be less whiney about staying in now that I can play Animal Crossing again.

I’m really hoping you can still swim, like you could in the last full version of the game.

Pocket Camp was kind of disappointing.  It was, by necessity of being a phone app, smaller than the other games, and just couldn’t keep me engaged enough to justify the drain on my phone battery.  But New Horizons is promising.

The most frustrating part of it so far, is that after an initial info dump, they dole out DIY recipes for Crafting fairly slowly. Or so it seems on day three.

I’ve paid off my travel expenses.  I ordered my house.  I’m desperate for a fucking wardrobe or armoire so I can store some shit.  Because I have already accumulated a bunch of crap.

I am super happy you can set stuff up outside.  I have a stone stool (crafted) that I’m keeping my cast iron pan on (also crafted), next to my cook-fire (purchased with bells), and lit by my tiki torches (crafted.).

I really hope I get to the point where I can build a bridge soon, because as fun as pole-vaulting over the rivers is, I’d really rather have some bridges.

I also intend to craft succulent gardens out of every tin can I catch while fishing.

In other news…

I need to be better about actually eating and hydrating like a grown up. My last two workouts really took it out of me, and I freaked out a bit, because “Coronavirus.”  I’m fine.  I’m just bad at eating when I don’t have a schedule.

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Also, if you’d like to see what sort of fiction I write when left to my own devices, please feel free to check out my fiction Patreon, Nothing Nice Comes Out of My Head.