Somewhere in my head, I was expecting the worst. I’ve been playing Animal Crossing long enough across its various iterations to remember a time when villagers would wish violent ill on your existence if you displeased them enough, and when abandoning your town for just a few days would cause a weed outbreak serious enough to make a gardener sob. So part of me was anticipating chaos and disaster – rampant foliage, rioting villagers, blazing buildings, a wild-eyed Isabelle perched on a pile of furry corpses – when I logged back into New Horizons for the first time in four years this week. And as I fired up my old save and prepared to return to Honaloha, I was braced.
