As anyone that watched the last few seasons of Lost will tell you, it’s quite difficult to go back to the island. That’s something that I definitely felt when loading back into Animal Crossing: New Horizons on Nintendo Switch 2. Thankfully, getting back to my island isn’t so traumatic. Having transferred from Switch to OLED to Switch 2, my old island from 2020 is still there, the one that I visited almost every day for over a year, and it’s been nice to revisit it, to soak in some of the relaxed charms, the idle busywork, and explore what’s new in Update 3.0, but will it draw me back in to resume my daily grind? Will I become the new Jacob… again?
The best thing that Nintendo has done for Animal Crossing with this update is to bring it to both the Nintendo Switch 2 and original Switch. Everything from the new dockside hotel, through to Resetti and smaller quality of life improvements, is available across both systems. The paid Switch 2 upgrade is a fairly light garnish on top of this.
Let’s start with the headline feature, the new hotel on the pier, run by the Kapp’n family. While it’s obviously a shrunken-down echo of the Happy Home Paradise DLC, the hotel is still a lovely free addition to the game that tickles your interior designer creativity with eight hotel rooms to decorate and theme. It’s also a great way to explore the support for Joy-Con 2 mouse mode support on Switch 2, which brings a pretty natural and fluid way to click, drag and place items within a room. But there are limits to mouse mode, which are a touch disappointing, as you can only use it when decorating a building interior, and it really is just for placement, so you have to resort to buttons to sift through the billions of items it feels like you have in the design inventory.
There’s also a new crafting mission box, with Tom Nook asking you to craft specific items for Kapp’n to sell, with more hotel store tickets as a reward. For an established player, it’s pretty easy to dip into this, with the first four items of each day awarding double tickets. What makes it even easier is the excellent quality of life improvement, so that you can craft using materials from your home storage, instead of needing to fill your inventory with the specific materials, that your home storage can go up to 9,000 items now, and that you can craft in multiples. It drains so much of the tedium out of crafting that it will feel awful to go back to anything less.
Once you’ve exhausted the possibilities there, the challenge for a returning player is what to do next? There’s the temptation, between the new consoles and these new updates, to start a completely new island and reshape it from scratch, but that’s honestly not for me. There’s also the option to dramatically overhaul your existing island, and Resetti can help with cleaning up chunks of land for you, but I find that comes with a hefty mental burden as well. So I’m thankful for the new Slumber Island, to give a lower stress path to creating a new island without removing what you previously built up.
You have the full creative tools available to you in the Slumber Island, and you’re presented with a fresh island to act as your canvas. It’s great being able to really share this with other players, giving other players full creative input alongside you. I can absolutely see this mode as Nintendo experimenting with the future of Animal Crossing multiplayer and collaboration.
This brings us to the Switch 2 of it all, with a fairly demure upgrade tied to a relatively minimal fee. The game resolution has been improved, which helps a bit with clarity since you’re not forcing 720p on a 1080p screen, but it’s a fairly minor-feeling improvement, especially as the game remains at 30fps.
Heading online, Switch 2 players can enable CameraPlay alongside GameChat and have their face beamed across the internet in a little bubble by their character. That works both in a Switch 1 compatible session (though is only displayed for Switch 2), and in the expanded 12-player sessions that are for Switch 2 Edition players only. A nice feature for those still with a dozen friends and family who are keen for a big meet up, but not one that I was able to test to this extent. You do still have the same fussiness with the game halting every time someone flies in and out.
I think Nintendo struck a great balance while updating Animal Crossing: New Horizons for Nintendo Switch 2. It’s not really enough to transform the game back into a daily obsession for me, but I can appreciate what it offers to players that never left their island behind or who are coming to the game for the first time on Nintendo Switch 2. It’s still the ideal island escape from the real world and remains free of smoke monsters.
