Animal Crossing: New Horizons can't compete with better decorating games anymore

-3,000 points from the Happy Home Academy

When Nintendo announced a hotel you can decorate in Animal Crossing: New Horizons 3.0, I was excited by the prospect. Yes, it was essentially the same as the Happy Home Designer add-on available for Switch Online subscribers, but collecting furniture and designing rooms is why I've stuck with Animal Crossing for more than 20 years. Then I played the 3.0 update and realized I'm more than happy to leave it behind, at least until Nintendo makes meaningful changes.

After Leilani recruited me for interior designing, I went upstairs for the first task — a nautical room, a fun little starter project, as I'm currently in the process of planning a similarly themed redo for my own real-life place. I ignored the advice that I can use pieces that aren't related to the theme (what's the point of a themed project where you can ignore the theme?), opened the furniture catalogue, and hauled everything out into the middle of the floor. This, I thought, was going to be good.

The hotel has no facilities in sight, so I figured a sensible, hygienic place to start would be giving our paying guest a little washing up area. By happy chance, Leilani's nautical collection included a small and stylish sink, so I dropped that in a corner and picked up a rattan wastebasket next. I wanted to put it right next to the sink. It might be an unusual personal quirk of mine, but I like not having 12 inches of space between every item in my home. New Horizons' rigid grid system doesn't care. It treats that rattan basket, that tiny rattan basket that barely occupies a quarter of a square, like a massive object. Little candles take up an entire table surface. Lamps close enough to a bed or sofa to actually be useful? No. You get offensively large gaps between every item or you get nothing at all.

So I chose nothing and quit the game. There are just too many decorating games that do it so much better now, and it makes fussing with Animal Crossing so unappealing. The Sims 4 is one of them. The grid system is pretty rigid here as well, but anyone — even console players — can use cheats to enable free object movement and placement. Sure, the game might randomly decide to jettison items when you log in again, but at least you can still place (or re-place) them the way you want. Like a bathroom with things next to the sink and even decorations on the wall, the latter of which is something New Horizons still has very restricted options for. Or a reading nook with lamps and tables spaced at normal distances from each other.

Another one I've spent a lot of time with recently that gets decorating right is Whisper of the House. It uses a weird little cashless gacha system that spits out random items at you, and "random" is definitely the operative word there. One time I got a packet of ramen. And that was cool because I could shove it in a corner on a kitchen counter next to too many bottles of sauce and oil and add that much more personality. Or decide the person who lives there is messy and place it on the table with a bunch of other stuff that doesn't belong on a table. Good decorating isn't just making a space look nice or real. It's telling the story of who lives there, like Unpacking, another one that's less punishing than Animal Crossing. You can stack things! And have multiple items on a surface! Okay, not that many items on a surface, but enough to design a space that feels natural.

Thanks, but no: I don't want to spend time struggling with something like New Horizons only to end up with what feels like a compromised vision, when I can play almost any other design game out there now and get exactly what I wanted instead. It makes sense that Nintendo chose not to overhaul a fundamental feature in a free update for an almost-six-year-old game. But it's increasingly apparent that Animal Crossing needs to change to stay relevant. Decorating games aren't going anywhere, and they're only going to get better. Heck, one of the selling points for Paralives is that it improves on The Sims, letting you do things like make curved walls or customize furniture without cheats and mods. If Nintendo doesn't get with the program, Animal Crossing's in danger of getting left behind.