Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp: It's not Animal Crossing

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is an experience where all the good in Animal Crossing is killed, and in its place is the cold, dark, stone cold comfort of money. It’s an experience that, if nothing else, has given me a new appreciation for what the good and proper games in the series do. Because if you’re looking for your next Animal Crossing, and a nice, relaxing experience, this is not it at all.

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Animal Crossing is a game founded on one core idea: living in a town. It’s never about the individual mechanics, or any one character. It’s all about that experience you get just existing there. Wanna spend a while bug catching? Talking to the neighbors? The game lays out many options and a few concrete goals, and then you just have at it and enjoy yourself.

Perhaps one of the most memorable aspects of that was the time element. Animal crossing works on a real time, year round system. Things take a day to make, so come back tomorrow! What’s important to note about this is that it’s remarkably healthy and respectful design. Unless you absolutely must get every collectable in every season, there is never any rush for anything, and the game lets you take as much time as you need. Every request and need for items is seasonal, so you’re always able to get what is required. Animal Crossing aims to coexist with you, not to have you keep up, not to show you what you’re missing, none of that. It’s a game series that greatly cares for and respects the player.

And from that, pocket camp gives us… checklists and timers. Huh.

Let’s start with the checklists. This undermines the entire point of simply existing in the world. Animal Crossing has always had tasks, but they were either very contextual, or very broad. “Go fill up the museum”. “If you’ve got a sea bass, could I have one?” They were always very gentle, never forced, always coexisted with the game proper, and totally optional.

The checklists in Pocket Camp are front, center, in your face, and painfully obvious. When a villager in the other games asks for fruit, you just have to keep that in mind. When a villager in this game asks for fruit, you’ll get a big notification for it, and it’ll say “⅓ ORANGES” and that just feels so, so artificial. It’s in your face, unavoidable, and not friendly to the player. These fun little requests turn into overt demands.

This feeds into my biggest complaint with the game as a whole: this doesn’t feel like a cohesive, complete world. There are checklists, there are levels, there are popups for the Real Money Currency all over the place. The world is a world with artificiality stamped all over it. Menus would appear in other games when it made sense. Looking through your pack, looking at a sign. Here, menus just pop up… because? It really takes away from the sense that this is a world, and adds to the feel that this is a game.

The timers don’t help with this at all. They front and center try to place how long things take in your head. It’s not this natural “oh, I’ll have it done tomorrow” or “wait a week” idea you have in older games. “This item will be finished in exactly 4 and a half hours, and by the way here’s a way to skip it” absolutely demolishes any semblance of a coherent, physical world to exist in.

Look, the point I’m making here isn’t that “microtransactions are bad” or “screw phone games”. The issue is that this game is trying to be a mini Animal Crossing, and failing miserably. Animal Crossing has always been first and foremost about the world, and this game kills any chance of having a world with timers and checklists hovering over everything.

I play Animal Crossing to relax, slightly influence a town, and just do whatever. I boot up Pocket Camp and am told to get 3 oranges and a squid. Pocket Camp is not the worst thing ever. But it is a story about how good game design can so easily die. It wears the clothes, it looks the part. However, Pocket Camp does not have the soul that Animal Crossing should.