It’s now one whole year since the Happy Home Paradise DLC dropped for Game of the Pandemic 2020/21, Animal Crossing: New Horizons. If you cast your minds back a full 365 days, you may recall that the DLC came just after a sizeable 2.0 update to the base game, and while most of us thought we had wrung every last drop from the game following months upon months of daily play, the extra content that came with the semi-sequel to 3DS’ Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer gave island life some extra zest as 2021 came to a close.
Though it didn’t add every single quality-of-life update fans had been asking for, the update and the DLC package — which was accessible for ‘free’ for anyone who was also subscribed to Nintendo Switch Online at the Expansion Pack tier — served as a fitting bookend for a game that kept millions of us company through some trying times.
despite weeds and roaches encroaching on some of our islands, there are members of the NL team who are still dropping in on Nook and co. on the regular
However, with so many other games to play on Switch and elsewhere, it’s been a while since many of us visited our islands. Despite logging ‘295 hours or more’ in the base game, this writer barely touched the DLC, and hasn’t fired it up at all this year — the last cloud save on the main menu reads ‘December 23rd, 2021’. There’s just so much else to play! The suggestion to archive the game to free up memory space has been denied several times, but the game has gone unplayed for nearly a year now.
A quick survey around Nintendo Life Towers, however, reveals that some of us are still popping back as recently as “yesterday“, “Sunday“, and “a month ago maybe?“. So despite weeds and roaches encroaching on some of our islands, there are members of the team who are still dropping in on Nook and co. on the regular.
To get a better idea of how the (is)land lies with a wider sample size of Switch gamers, we thought we’d put the question to you in the poll below. This isn’t meant as some sort of quality judgement on the game (‘omg I can’t believe there’s nothing left to do in this game I put 573 hours into!‘), rather we’re interested to see just how long the tail is on this game with the hardcore Nintendo crowd — which is you!
Feel free to elaborate below on why you’re still playing, or why you haven’t been back for a while.