Animal Crossing: New Horizons

If you owned a Switch in 2020, chances are you were playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons. If you didn’t own a Switch before the latest entry in Nintendo’s beloved life sim series launched right at the beginning of the covid-19 lockdowns, you may have bought one so you could maintain some semblance of human interaction. Animal Crossing: New Horizons is an often cumbersome game, so much so that there are fake Nintendo Directs made to illustrate all the bare minimum improvements fans hoped for but Nintendo never actually implemented. Even so, Animal Crossing: New Horizons represents one of the quintessential “you had to be there” moments in video game history. Words alone can’t capture how unifying it was to go to your friends’ islands when we couldn’t see each other anywhere else. Animal Crossing: New Horizons may be clunky, but it was also a creative and social outlet for millions of people when we needed it most. It’s easily one of the most important games on the Switch.