Many people regard Animal Crossing: New Horizons as a mere relaxing simulation game, but some of its aspects can be truly horrifying. Despite seeming innocent and even cute, the game contains many interactions that can be very suspicious and sometimes even cruel to the other island residents. And, by disguising its inner horror with layers of cute graphics and animations, New Horizons hides the manipulative and unpredictable monster that the protagonist really is.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons puts players in a completely deserted island, in which they live with a select number of villagers and try to make it habitable. After achieving certain requirements, this role completely changes, and they end up becoming responsible for managing the location itself; deciding who lives there, where their houses should be built, and what the place should look like. While this can result in the most delightful situations being brought to life in ACNH, it also creates suspicious mechanics and features that can make the game terrifying from NPCs’ perspective.
Despite its innocent and inconspicuous appearance, Animal Crossing: New Horizons has a great amount of horror hidden in it, beyond the eventual giant tarantulas and scorpions. Similar to games like Doki Doki Literature Club and Resident Evil, its main villains are hiding in plain sight and have a very unexpected identity: the player. While wearing fun outfits, deg the island and trying to make the perfect town, the protagonist of ACNH manages to be just as cunning and manipulative as DDLC's Monika. And even though many of their interactions and actions seem harmless at first glance, as villagers helplessly watch the protagonist strip their autonomy away and display unexplainable powers, players seem more and more like supernatural, Lovecraftian, monsters.
ACNH Villagers Are Treated As Merchandise
Animal Crossing’s Nookazon online store is one of the most useful tools for players. Providing an easy and online way of meeting other people with which they can trade various types of items, it became popular rather quickly among ACNH fans. However, Nookazon is also the main source of one of the villagers’ greatest fears, because, with its use becoming more and more common, treating them as mere merchandise became a trend.
The original Animal Crossing had its animal-like villagers representing strangers in a new town. They had various types of personalities and should be befriended as a part of making progress in the game. However, with the series’ newest installment, this changed completely. Instead of being valued for their individuality and posing as one of the greatest gameplay assets in the game, they began playing a role of decorative props for players’ islands. And the prettiest and most popular Animal Crossing: New Horizon’s villagers started to be assigned a different type of importance.
Given players were very eager to have some of them populating their islands, others began trading them in exchange for Bells and, sometimes, real money. Quickly enough, it became a trend in the community to have certain villagers be auctioned and sold when they asked to move away. From the island resident’s perspective, this is one of the most terrifying aspects of the game, as the person they trusted to manage their new home’s development was now the one abducting and selling them to the highest bidder.
Animal Crossing Players Are Dictators Of Their Islands
One of the game’s best qualities is the fact that it allows enough flexibility in customization for ACNH players to build a masterpiece out of a deserted island. By using the processing power of the Nintendo Switch, Animal Crossing: New Horizons introduced new essential features for deg, such as allowing furniture to be placed anywhere and making even the terrain customizable in terraforming. However, to the villagers, this has had plenty of negative consequences, as it grants one of their neighbors enough power for them to become a ruthless dictator.
While the protagonist can report the other residents for unpleasant or inappropriate behavior, the villagers don’t have the same privilege. This makes it so that they must endure all types of cruelty the players might direct their way. The Animal Crossing villagers considered the most hideous are the frequently main target of harassment, which is often physical, but they are unable to express themselves further than just snapping at their cruel bully and asking them to stop.
Not only that, but they have no autonomy whatsoever about their own lives. The protagonist is the one that makes all decisions regarding the island, including where the residents are supposed to live and for how long they inhabit the town. Establishing a dystopia similar to the one depicted in Papers, Please, both immigration and emigration are controlled by the player, and no villager can leave without explicit authorization. When combined with the fact that asking to move away might result in being sold to another island, this can easily make most NPCs live in constant fear.
ACNH Players Have Terrifying Powers
Many of the main aspects of playing New Horizons involve altering settings or selecting different options in the main menu. While, to players, abilities like speeding up dialog and restarting an Animal Crossing island are common enough to be brushed off, they often result in the display of supernatural abilities in-game. This can easily be horrifying, because it indicates that the protagonist controls the very reality that they inhabit and its fate, creating a deep Lovecraftian horror that hides behind a cute and cozy aesthetic.
During the game, players are taught how to speed up dialog to skip repetitive lines or just reduce the amount of time it takes for someone to finish speaking. It’s a mechanic that is typically not given much thought, given that many other games have similar ones, but it can be very distressing when analyzed from a different perspective. Not only is the protagonist typically the richest ACNH villager and responsible for every design choice in their shared home, but they can also control the others’ own bodies. The player compels them to speak faster after pressing a button, and the island residents are controlled through a technology that is outside their realm of comprehension.
When feeling uninspired, bored, or wanting to implement a completely new design, players are usually advised to restart their Animal Crossing island. This means destroying it completely and replacing it with a new one. Much like other mechanics of the game, it can also be very disturbing, given it means the complete annihilation of everything the villagers ever knew. Some players attempt to make this more pleasant to everyone, throwing epic parties before destroying their island or writing goodbye letters to their neighbors. However, in any other scenario or game, these actions would have been seen as threats rather than pleasant attitudes.
Luckily, New Horizons is just a cozy and cute simulation game that nearly everyone can enjoy and has no real intention to be scary. The villagers live their happy lives in the islands and don’t complain about the horror behind certain features and mechanics, or their general lack of autonomy. Most of them even befriend the protagonist, offering them gifts and writing letters for them. In any other context, this hidden dread would have been used to build a truly horrifying experience, but, for now, players can continue to enjoy Animal Crossing: New Horizons without much concern for this aspect of the game.