A New Horizons update in the year of our lord 2026???

I'm not gonna waste my time explaining Animal Crossing: New Horizons to you. It came out back in 2020 and made waves, at this point anyone who wanted to read a full review of the game has read one. I want to spend this article mostly talking about my personal thoughts and feelings on New Horizons, my experiences playing in the past and present, and focus mostly on reviewing the update and the new additions it brings to the game.

With that said, in the absurd year of 2026, amidst a very strange global climate and an uncertain future, in one of the worst eras of the gaming industry we have seen with the most anti-consumer practices ever performed by the companies involved... we get an update to New Horizons???

I was so sure that this game was dead. Like, dead dead. The content updates stopped a good while ago, and were never all too exciting to begin with. Most of them added content that has been in every other Animal Crossing game at launch, content like various holidays, The Roost, etc. There's been some nice new features, some returning characters, things like Harv's Island expanding, the new farming and cooking mechanics, but the game has mostly been stagnant from the start, and certainly since the updates dried up. I thought we would never see another update for this game, nothing until a new Animal Crossing game. Yet, in spite of this, Nintendo announced both a Nintendo Switch 2 Edition coming soon, and a free content update, version 3.0, coming in January. Insane.

This prompted me to go back to New Horizons, which is, of course, the entire point. Nintendo wants to continue selling their old software, keep players on their hardware and services, and keep them there indefinitely. Drawing in new players and making old players return is exactly what free content updates seek to achieve. The issue is, in order for that to be successful, the game has to be good. It has to be fun. It has to be worth returning to. Something like Sonic Racing: Crossworlds accomplished this because the game is incredibly well-made and well-polished, in addition to free content updates expanding an already content-complete game with even more. But when I went back to New Horizons in early December to return to my island, clean things up, get back into the groove of daily gameplay, I ended up falling off of it in early January, a week before the update even came out. The save I continued from I only played for a month or two in the fall of 2025.

So why does New Horizons loose me so quickly? It feels like every time I return to the game, I stay onboard for less and less time before letting it collect dust on the shelf again. I went from a year plus on my first island, maybe 6 months on my second one, and now about 3 months total on my current island. Is there some sort of Animal Crossing event horizon that I keep falling into???

I think these numbers line up pretty well with my experiences with the Animal Crossing franchise, and the distance I gain from my first time with New Horizons. I didn't get it at release because at the time, I had never played an Animal Crossing game. I didn't learn more about it for a while, and eventually received it as a Christmas gift in either 2021 or 2022 (my backlog is a little hazy for that period, can't quite tell when I got it). That was my first island, which I had a lot of fun building up, and played for around a year in total. I had a lot of fun with it, but after a year of playing it most days out of a week, I decided it was okay to take a vacation from my island getaway, and focus on some other stuff. I actually ended up playing a lot more Breath of the Wild after that, and finally completed Master Mode. My vacation grew longer and longer, unintentionally drifting further and further from a game I once played on a daily basis...

Flash forward to 2025. I start thinking about Animal Crossing again, and since I've been doing a lot with my New 2DS, I decide to download New Leaf and give that a try. Technically I played a couple days worth of it prior to receiving New Horizons, but I mostly treated it as a demo of the series before officially deciding to get New Horizons, and I didn't remember much of what I played. I played my 3DS every day anyway, so I decided it wouldn't hurt to add New Leaf to my rotation of games. After about a week, I fell in love with everything about it. The style, the sound, the feel, the writing, everything about New Leaf oozed life and charm and a strange warmth that made it feel incredibly cozy and fun. I really liked talking to my neighbors, I met Bonbon and got to be best friends with her, I even scanned a few Amiibo to get some fun items and Zelda-themed villagers, Medli and Epona! I would play for hours every day, and I poured a lot into it.

A couple weeks later, I'm in my apartment when my friend drops by. They have their Switch which they just brought from their family's home, and said they're going back to Animal Crossing. I let them dock it to my TV, and they show me around their island. I'm reminded of how much fun I had with New Horizons when I first got it, so I grabbed my own Switch and started a new save to play with my friend. That put them a bit ahead of me in terms of progress, but that's alright, I love the grind of Animal Crossing! I've been playing New Leaf daily for a couple weeks now, right?

This string of New Horizons was my second and shorter stint with the game, following my experience with New Leaf and playing alongside my friend. Starting from the beginning and following through the months in which I played with them, I realized just how much worse it felt as an experience compared to the 3DS game. I stuck with it for a while, playing almost daily with my friend, working on our respective islands, visiting each other to trade items, dressing up our villagers, filling the museum, you know, Animal Crossing stuff. But bit by bit my friend started to fall of off the game, both due to dwindling interest and lack of free time to continue a daily game like that. As they drifted away, so did I, and after a fair run on the island, I stopped playing again. In its place, I continued to play New Leaf on and off for a good while, and I believe it ended up with a longer run than my original save of New Horizons. I still pull it out now and again, even though I'm not active on a daily basis, and have a few hours of fun with New Leaf.

The last time I started from the beginning was for a few months in the fall of 2025. I wanted to give the game another chance to wow me. I played enough to see the credits roll, about two months or so of playtime, and almost immediately afterwards dropped it. I only came back to it when I heard there was a new update coming out and I knew I wanted to write about it. I figured it would be a good excuse to write some of my thoughts and complaints about New Horizons, and then put it to rest with a review of it's 2026 content update. Even with that motivation, for a game I haven't played in months, I didn't last more than a month of dedicated time to it. I had a few days of really productive gameplay, interspersed with a couple more chill days, and then after a short while... I was done. I just didn't have any urge to play anymore. I played and beat Silly Bandz: Play the Craze for the DS. I bought and played Clubhouse Games for the DS. I received Sonic Racing: Crossworlds for Christmas and beat it. Somewhere in there, I even pulled out New Leaf again and played around in my town for the evening. I just didn't want to play New Horizons anymore.

So what is it?? What creates this Animal Crossing event horizon that makes me play New Horizons less and less each time I come back to it? The game obviously isn't getting worse each time, it's been the same every time I've played, so what's going?

I think the frequency and length of time I've spent playing the game each time I've come back to it is indicative of some deep-seated flaws in New Horizons specifically, and the ways that it fails to deliver on certain expectations of Animal Crossing games of the past. Nothing I've said about this game now or in the past is unique, I feel the same as a lot of people about New Horizons. I just wanted to specifically record my thoughts about the game and the state of it in 2026, as well as noting what the update adds to the experience (or the lack of anything worthwhile).

For starters, some of my complaints with the game.

It takes wayyyy too long to get started. New Leaf is a fully up and running game that allows you to go about your preferred gameplay within a couple days. Very succinct and to the point with everything that happens. New Horizons, by comparison, takes a week or more to get things started, slowly step by step establishing the tents, paying for your first house, moving the museum in, opening Nook's Cranny, the Able Sisters, etc. This is the same variety of content that is available after a few days in New Leaf, but New Horizons is a complete time-drain until these things are established. I don't think that making these actions manual parts of the progression is by any means more interesting or engaging than the way it was done in New Leaf, especially considering New Leaf had a whole main street with a handful of shops to unlock, in addition to larger stages of Nook's Cranny than is ever reached in New Horizons. Some of these shops were added in the update that expanded Harv's Island, but that just makes this setup process even longer when compared to New Leaf. Two out of the three times I've started this game from the beginning, I've time-traveled to speed up the intro (my first and third saves). It makes it harder than necessary to onboard the player in the beginning phase of the game when it's so slow and meticulous, especially when the naturally-occurring rivers and cliffs block off access to a good portion of the island until you get the recipes to craft the tools needed.

Speaking of, crafting. Or, more specifically, item durability. In something like Breath of the Wild, while still not above criticism, collecting weapons is fairly simple and never usually too much of a hassle, especially in late-game. In New Horizons, you start the game only able to make "Flimsy" tools which break quickly, and things like the axe can only collect wood from trees, not chop them down. This limits you extensively until you unlock the recipes for the traditional Animal Crossing tools, which are crafted by upgrading the flimsy tools, and are far more durable. That is to say, they won't break in minutes, but if you're busy that day more than a few will break before the end. There are other varieties of tools that become available in Nook's Cranny, like the "Outdoorsy" tool set, and you can obtain the crafting recipes for the golden tools, at no point does the gameplay loop become less of a grind. If your tool breaks, you have to gather the resources to craft a Flimsy one, then upgrade it, and if you want the golden one, upgrade it again. The golden tools can still break, by the way, they just have better durability. Granted, in older Animal Crossing titles, the speed of the game was slowed by waiting for the shop to sell a tool you didn't yet have, which also limits you in terms of actions, but that process was a lot smoother and still took less time than in New Horizons. I had a full set of tools (minus the slingshot) by the end of a week, and was already working towards upgrading the shop so that I could get a slingshot, which mostly happened as a byproduct of playing the game. It didn't feel particularly limiting, considering I had most of my tools already, and there was no shortage of things to do. Between the speed of the opening and the ease of access to tools that never break, I always felt like New Leaf respected my time as the player a lot more than New Horizons, while giving me a more natural and fun way to expand my toolset.

On the note of New Horizons being less natural in it's gameplay, a huge reason I've played a lot more New Leaf is the quality of the writing compared to New Horizons. The villagers historically have been charming staples of the town, with unique personalities and dialogue, NPCs that are genuinely fun to interact and build relationships with. There's a reason a lot of long-time fans have favorite and/or least favorite villagers, a lot of it has to do with interactions they've had. Bonbon isn't necessarily the most visually-interesting bunny villager in my opinion, but chatting with her in my town in New Leaf every day, playing minigames and running errands, giving and receiving gifts, the way she was written made it feel like I was actually spending time with a friend. It made me feel a little bad when I missed her birthday because I was away from my 3DS for a bit, and I got excited when she reminded me of the time capsule I had buried for her that she wanted to open now. She's not my favorite character design, but her writing and personality really hooked me and was a big reason I enjoyed New Leaf every day. The same can be said for Medli, my other favorite villager from New Leaf! Every conversation, positive negative or indifferent, felt like a genuine conversation with someone in my town, and it made me more attached to them, to my role as mayor, and to the game as a whole. Now, it doesn't matter which game, I'll always be excited to run across Bonbon. New Horizons, by comparison, is incredibly flat. The dialogue is pretty barren, a lot of villagers don't have many things they can say and incredibly few ways to interact with you aside from gifts. Basically all of them say a variation of "Nice day for a walk, huh?" and end after a single bubble. They'll visit your house and wander around silently for a bit before leaving. They don't really do anything at all. Nothing they say feels personal or interesting, it's mostly surface-level nothing dialogue bubbles that are just there so they have something to say when you chat with them. It is so lacking compared to the system that exists in New Leaf, and makes it really hard to feel attached to any villagers in New Horizons outside of an aesthetic enjoyment... like they're just figurines or plushes that you keep around depending on how cute you think they are. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, but when compared to games of the past, it's incredibly disappointing from a player perspective.

There's also a lot of little nitpicks that I could list too, like not getting to choose your upgrade order for your house loans, not having many buildings for your town after the starting shops (all relegated to Harv's Island), and the heavy emphasis on the "daily missions" format with the Nook Miles+ system. But it's not all bad; there's a lot that New Horizons did that I think is a benefit to the series, like some of the new tools, placing furniture outside, better racial representation in the character creator, more gender-inclusive language and characters, there's a lot of wonderful things added to New Horizons. They are 100% the reason I continue to come back to it the way I have. I just wish these great features were in a better Animal Crossing. What I hope for most of all is for the next Animal Crossing to be far more like New Leaf, but featuring the improvements that New Horizons brought. That means better writing, more respect for the player's time, better management of series-staple content, hell I even like crafting! It's a fun way to interact with the environment, make new furniture, farm and cook, etc. I just don't want my tools to be a constant grind. That's not fun by any extent, it just eats time and resources. I don't think Animal Crossing is dead or lost by any means, I just think the most recent game has a lot of problems and I hope they get addressed in the next entry.

Now, in 2026, we have an update to this 5, nearly 6-year-old game. Let's talk about it.

Going into this, I opted to make a checklist of bulletpoints from the update trailer Nintendo released, and mark things off as I checked them out, including a little note about my thoughts as I played. Now I have a neat little note from when I played today, and I'll just run down the list top to bottom and talk about things. Nintendo Support actually has patch notes for the 3.0 update as well, and there's a lot of little things that have been changed that I didn't notice, like Isabelle will now suggest tunes for the island tune! You can read the full patch notes for yourself here, and do check out the update for yourself if you think any of these things might increase the game's longevity for you. I used it as a supplementary list of things to check out after running my initial list from the trailer itself.

First and foremost, I went and checked out the new Resort Hotel. Isabelle told me upon loading for the day that it was opened on a new extension to the pier, and she wasn't kidding. The stubby little dock that used to sit on the coast is now long enough to almost touch the net barrier in the waters around the island, and the hotel is attached by a platform built off of it near the end. I was really pleased with how quickly I was able to jump into things, there wasn't a huge sequence to get it built or to learn the mechanics, they just introduce everyone inside and let you go ham. I was able to immediately go and decorate the first hotel room, which was really fun! It's your average Happy Home Designer/Happy Home Paradise gameplay, designing a themed hotel room to entice visitors to your island. I even saw my first visitor today wandering my island and talking about their vacation to see my place! It's nice to have a few extra villagers walking around. Such a huge island can start to feel a little barren with only so many characters out and about. I think it's a shame you can't invite any of the hotel guests to live on your island, it seems like that would be a perfect addition to this whole feature, but having visitors is nice on its own. You can only decorate two rooms per day, so with 8 rooms you won't be finishing the hotel in one session, but it's a really nice daily task to add to your to-do list on your island! Decorating rooms and filling DIY orders both reward you with tickets, a new currency, and you won't be wanting for them any time soon, they are plentiful. After you finish the base 8 hotel rooms, Leilani adds a new VIP room as an additional section to decorate, picking a theme and decorating a room for a specific hotel guest, which can be chosen using Amiibo if you want! You're also then allowed to redecorate every room, and claim tickets reward once per day for starting a room from scratch. The souvenir shop is pretty neat, it has some hotel-themed furniture, and other exclusive item sets. You pay for them using tickets, and I've already ordered quite a few items from here, there's a lot of really cute furniture to collect! The souvenir shop continues to expand its stock as you increase the hotel's reputation, both through finishing rooms and filling DIY orders.

Speaking of, right outside is the DIY shipment box, which is actually tied to the DIY app on the Nookphone! You can view your current orders, along with how many are needed, and craft directly from that menu when at a workbench. Something I didn't see noted in the trailer, and may not be new, is the ability to craft using materials stored in your house storage! This was another surprise change added with 3.0, and the game even gave me a pop-up explaining it to me upon crafting for the first time of the day, the only caveat being that you can't access your storage materials from another island, like a friend or a Nook Miles Tour. It's an excellent upgrade that makes crafting way better! A big deterrent to DIY in the past has been material management, not only in collecting the materials, but also in storing them and having to move them to my pockets before crafting. This pairs nicely with the new bulk crafting system, which is also incredibly easy to use. I think the general quality of DIY is a lot higher now with both of these features, and while it doesn't solve my issues with the tool crafting, it does make the whole system more accessible, and I think it's a good move. On the note of DIY shipments, I do wish there was a terminal to exchange Hotel tickets for bells, like the Meow Coupons in New Leaf. The souvenirs are great, but there's only so many I want, and you get so many from fulfilling DIY orders. I suppose you can do this in a sort of roundabout way by exchanging for furniture items and then selling them the next day when they arrive, but it would still be nice if there was a direct method to exchange them for bells.

And don't let the new look mislead you: you can still decorate it like before! Now you can even put stuff in the little landing outside the hotel doors! I personally put a workbench next to the dropoff box so I can craft on demand for the DIY orders. I'm sure some people more creative than me will have a lot of cool designs for ways to decorate the expanded pier!

After checking out the Resort Hotel and related features, I wandered my island to do some daily tasks, namely digging up gyroids and fossils (I only need a few more to finish the museum exhibit...). While going about this, I stumbled upon Resetti, who explained his new Reset Service in great detail (though it should be said that he was constantly stopping to ask if I wanted to hear more, in case I'd rather not). I haven't used this yet, and I don't know how much I ever will, but I think it's a fine feature to have! It costs 60,000 bells for the day, but after that you can freely reset any area of any size, as many times as you like, for the rest of the day. Pretty pricey I'd say, but no doubt useful for some. Apparently this works by talking to Isabelle to have her summon him to your island, at which point he will wander around for the day, and you can talk to him to initiate the Reset Service, or just have a chat! It's really nice to have another legacy special character return in New Horizons, it's a small victory considering how many are still mostly absent, but a victory all the same.

Now for some of the new item sets. I checked out the terminal in Resident Services to order a few LEGO items, and all of them are pretty cute! I was surprised to find that there were also items from Pocket Camp, which previously required you to link the mobile app to obtain them, but are now available to everyone! I never played it, but it's very cute to see them looping back into the main series, especially without restrictions like this! This is true of all the account link items actually, with the Super Mario items previously requiring you to link your Nintendo Account, but those too are now available to all players. The exception is the new Zelda and Splatoon items, which are unlocked in Nook Shopping as soon as you scan a series-respective Amiibo to invite a camper. The Zelda items are really cool, they have a lot of the same items from New Leaf like the Rupee, the Heart Container, the Fairy Bottle, etc. There's also items that used to be in New Leaf's fortune cookies, which you had to spend 3DS Play Coins to get, like the Triforce and the Master Sword in its stone. There's obviously some new outfits, like Link's Champion Tunic and Zelda's ancient attire from Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom respectively. I also look forward to hiding a decayed Guardian on my island, maybe up near my ruins I built on the cliffside... Unfortunately I can't take a look at the Splatoon items, since I don't have an Amiibo for it, but rest assured that all of these new Amiibo items are very cute and fun! The limit of 5 items per day on Nook Shopping will feel stricter than ever if you're grabbing all of these for the first time, but at least it got me to unlock the Nook Shopping mobile app!

It took about a full week of designing hotel rooms, sending out DIY orders, and chatting with guests to finally unlock the Nintendo consoles in the souvenir shop. I was really looking forward to testing them both as decorative items and as interactables, so I ordered a variety to check out as soon as possible. Visually, they're adorable. How could they not be? Scale-model recreations of famous Nintendo consoles in Animal Crossing is like a match made in Happy Home Heaven. However, when you get to the actual gameplay, that's where problems start to arise...

Since you can only order five items at a time, I chose the NES, Gameboy, and all three variants of the SNES (Super Famicom, NTSC, and PAL). Getting over the initial cuteness of putting them on the table of my spare room in my player's house, I went ahead and started by checking the Gameboy. Immediately I got a popup saying that I could play a game if I had a Nintendo Switch Online membership. The interactive feature of all these consoles is reliant on an NSO subsciption, which is beyond lame. Can Nintendo really not afford to give away GB Dr. Mario for free with a $60 game??? Oh yeah, and each console only has one game running on a built-in emulator. The Gameboy comes with Dr. Mario, which plays fine. I think high score-based games work best in this kind of environment, though I don't know if Dr. Mario is my first thought for this on Gameboy. The NES was next, and it comes with... Ice Climber? I gotta be honest, I wasn't expecting that. It's not the best NES game, but it does technically fit the criteria I mentioned, which I'm sure is why it was bundled. It's just... Ice Climber? Not even like, Kid Icarus? The original Super Mario Bros. is usually a no-brainer here, but I guess 2026 is the year of the Ice Climber. Testing out the Super Nintendo systems was interesting, as I started with the Super Famicom and the PAL SNES. The Super Famicom comes with Panel de Pon, which is a delight! Simple, high score-based puzzle game with plenty of modes and options, great inclusion! The PAL and NTSC systems actually both come with the same game, F-Zero, so which one you get is all up to aesthetic preference. If you want it to match you Super Fami, go with PAL, but if you want the classic grey/purple system, go with NTSC. F-Zero is also a fun inclusion, though with how much is unlocked in that game, it begs the question of if these emulators save or not? With the other games it doesn't really matter, but I feel like F-Zero it would be useful to save new unlocked difficulties, right? I'm flat-out not good enough at F-Zero to get to a point where there would be any progress to save, but it's a bit of an unknown to me as of now. And though I didn't order them, I did check online, and the Famicom plays Clu Clu Land (sure), and the Famicom Disk Systems plays... Ice Hockey??? Okay, I absolutely do not understand either of these game decisions. What did Clu Clu Land do to earn the spot representing the Famicom game library? Where did Ice Hockey come from??? Absolutely baffling inclusions, honestly glad I prioritized the consoles I did. There is also a non-functional Switch 2, as well as some classic Nintendo toys, like the Ultrahand. It's altogether a cute collection of furniture items, with some neat interactivity, but it's bogged down by really pointless bloat... One game per console? NSO required?? Ice Hockey??? I feel like this was a really half-assed attempt to recreate something like the NES items from Animal Crossing on GameCube, and I feel like Nintendo missed the mark on enough things to make the interactive portion of these items completely pointless. I would have loved if they maybe had a two-player mode, where a second person on your island could sit down at the same console as you and do something as simple as 2-player Panel de Pon, or if they offered a couple of games per console, or even if they gave them to New Horizons owners for free without the need for NSO! And any of these factors could change in a future patch, but I won't hold out hope. This is probably the biggest missed opportunity in this update, and I really wish that Nintendo had done more with the concept. Cute furniture though.

I chose not to mess with the Slumber Island feature, not really my thing, but having a creative mode for decorating and doing photo shoots definitely seems like a useful tool for players to have. The trailer did show off some new movement tech during the Slumber Island section, which can be used anywhere in the game, regardless of the island you're on or if you're currently using Island Construction or not! By holding the L button, your character locks into the nearest cardinal direction, and as long as you hold down L, using the left stick will make them slide and side-step to maintain the direction they're facing. Obviously useful for terraforming, but also really useful for laying down paths, decorating, and even aiming your tools! The only downside is you can't use it indoors, but slide all you want outside! Additionally, the Slumber Island has been confirmed to not only let you summon villagers that are currently living on your island, but also any villager that has lived on your island in the past. Now you can take the ultimate group photo!

In the end though... how much does this stuff matter? Well, most of my complaints about New Horizons aren't addressed by this update, which I knew would likely be the case. However, I appreciated that the hotel didn't exacerbate the already-tedious setup process of the game, and the new crafting updates greatly increase the accessibility of DIY as a game mechanic. The hotel gives players a lot of decorating fun, which in the past was reserved for spin-off games and DLC, while also adding some fun new items to the game. Ultimately, it's New Horizons, but more. There's more items, there's more facilities and activities, and most importantly, more quality of life updates. It goes a long way to fixing the game in a lot of small ways that add up to big differences in the experience, and while it leaves most of the biggest issues untouched, it does more than I'd expect of New Horizons in the big 2026. I guess we'll see in six months when I think about when I last played New Horizons.

~ Alex Amelia Pine

This post is a part of the series Game Reviews

Update
I continued to update this article after posting it, as I continued to play daily and explore the update contents more and more. I wanted to make sure that I covered all of the topics I felt were most important, and covered them at a depth that accurately portrayed their presence in the update. I now feel that this article truly represents my thoughts on the additions to the game, and gives people a good idea of what's been added. Thank you so much for reading!