The nostalgia and surprise of returning to Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Last week, Nintendo surprised everybody with an announcement: Over four years after its “last major free content update,” Animal Crossing: New Horizons is getting a Switch 2 upgrade and a free update for all players. It’s not often that an incredibly popular game goes years between updates, but since when has anyone been able to predict what Nintendo will do?

In 2021, the company was very clear that the 2.0 update would be the game’s last. Slowly but surely, most of us stopped playing, accepting that support for New Horizons had ended. Well, sike, I guess! In preparation for the 3.0 update and Switch 2 Edition this January, we at noti.group decided to check in on our islands and see what we’ll be coming back to in a few months.

I’ll admit, I was expecting a much bigger mess. While I haven’t played New Horizons in ages — the villagers tell me it’s been 11 months, though it feels much longer — my kids have jumped into the island periodically during that time. And, just like in real life, they’re slobs in Animal Crossing. Yet our island appears mostly intact. There were a few items strewn about, and a shockingly small number of weeds, but not much else to complain about. Mostly, without me to do the gardening, the entire island is now one gigantic field of flowers. It’s beautiful and not at all what I was anticipating. Even more shocking: Both of their houses were tidy. Now if only I could get them to do that in real life. —Andrew Webster

Returning to Isla Ashtra has been a neat exercise in forensically investigating my own brain. After being away for many years — one villager told me it was five years and four months, to be exact — there are some parts of my island where I can clearly see my thought process and other places where I have no idea what the hell I was thinking. I was pleased to see my little pizza shop and fondly remembered the process of remixing mundane items like a hat into a clever pizza display. But, as I continued to explore, I found items discarded randomly about — a crystal ball here, a mirror there — and I simply cannot intuit why they’re there. Maybe I meant to make a tarot shop, or maybe I just needed to free up some inventory space. Who knows? Certainly not me. —Ash Parrish

My island, once populated with lovable neighbors and thoughtful placement of shrubs and amenities, is gone. It has been wiped from existence by its creator, me, in a swift act of negligence while moving data from an original Switch to a Switch 2. I guess I didn’t do something correctly. Oops. Precious erased neighbors, cover your ears for what I’m about to say. I should feel more sad, but I’m not. Maybe I’ll become engrossed in building a new island once the Switch 2 Edition update comes out in January. If I do, I will erect a memorial to you all on it that I hopefully don’t accidentally erase someday. —Cameron Faulkner

My house is perfect, an oasis of organized calm. The kitchen is warm and inviting, espresso maker on the counter beautifully complimenting the totally-not-a-KitchenAid mixer on the sideboard. There are no clothes strewn on the hardwood parquet of my bedroom floor. Upstairs, in the office, there is nothing on my desk except my laptop and a mug of coffee. The bathroom, too, is spotless. If only I could say the same for literally any part of my real home, where my children — now ages 12 and 7 — currently sit on our stained, ratty sofa, fighting over who gets to be the lead player in ACNH today.

The truth is, my island house is not a home but a fly trapped in amber — a fossil, fixed and unchanging. My daughter was 6 and my son a baby when I first started playing, and back then I was able to exert some measure of control over the island and, by extension, over anything else at all, in a world gone even madder than average. But really, the world is theirs to inherit, and to remake in their image. And they have done so, with flowers, trees, rocks, and even houses in unexpected, unfamiliar places. The part of me that has learned to make peace with the chaos is allowed to overrule the part of me that craves organization. If only they wouldn’t leave so much crap to trip on lying around on the ground everywhere — in both our worlds. —Kate Cox

I played New Horizons every single day for two years, amounting to what my Switch Lite tells me is over 1,700 hours of time spent on my island. I collected every single item in every single colorway. I unlocked every DIY recipe and, after the 2.0 update, every cooking recipe. My storage is full of spare Nook Miles Tickets and crafting ingredients and rare seasonal items. But my island itself? It’s completely unfinished. The fish market along the southern shore gives way to a vast field of wheat (and artfully placed weeds), and then… nothing. The river lies incomplete and connected to no water source. The museum sits alone at the top of a hill I never finished building. And I’d moved all the villagers’ houses to the beach to keep them out of the way for a construction period that never ended.

I am so unbelievably excited to have a reason to complete that construction. I’ll see you all in January. —Kallie Plagge

When I last fired up New Horizons three years, 11 months, and (estimating here) a couple of days ago, I had no idea all of the hoops you had to jump through in order to move your island between consoles. I left my island, LilHalcyon, thinking I could always return — even on a new Switch — once I downloaded the game again. Had I heard people telling each other about the importance of backing up your island online and using the Island Transfer Tool? Probably, but I didn’t take that advice to heart. This is how I wound up in a mild panic, confused as to why LilHalcyon wouldn’t load up on my Switch 2. As I sat there looking at Tom Nook in a void of darkness telling me he couldn’t find a backup on my OLED Switch either, I thought something might have gone wrong with the download process and all my villagers had been lost in the ether.

But then Kallie pointed out that I probably never moved things over from my long-uncharged OG Switch — and she was right. I was relieved to see all of my old buds still knocking around. All of the roaches and weeds were kinda gnarly, but LilHalcyon was still the charming little homestead I remembered. A couple of other villagers speculated that I was a figment of their imaginations who might have never existed in the first place. But I’ve let them all know that reports of my (and our island’s) death have been greatly exaggerated. —Charles Pulliam-Moore