Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp

Android, iOS

We shake the first tree and sigh. A tap of the trunk, and it relinquishes its fruit as expected, but this time its yield is replaced with a timer: 2hr 59min. It’s merely the first of many numbers you’ll see playing Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp. The series’ peculiar spell has always been dependent on maintaining an illusion, a combination of smart engineering and excellent writing disguising the ones and zeroes that are invisibly determining the behaviour of your villagers and the rules of its world. Clarke’s third law is only true so long as the magician withholds his secrets; Pocket Camp doesn’t so much let you peek behind the curtain as forcefully tear the drapes down and show you exactly how everything works. There are moments at which you can admire the assembly, but the whole thing feels grimly mechanical.

It begins, fittingly, with a misunderstanding, as you arrive at a campsite and are immediately appointed its new manager. Your job is to make it a more attractive place to visit. Given a selection of themes (natural, cute, sporty and cool), you’re told which animal is a fan of each, and thus you determine your first guest. You will, the game insists, be able to collect all items regardless of your pick, and it’s here that Pocket Camp’s main theme is exposed. This is a game about acquisition.

Those for whom Animal Crossing has always been about the steady accumulation of furniture may yet get sucked into the central loop. Your first animal visitor arrives with a request, which you quickly fulfil, and a heart appears over their head, filling up until you’re informed that your friendship has levelled up. Your reward is two types of currency. We’re accustomed to being given a small monetary bonus for completing tasks in Animal Crossing, but this time our payment also includes crafting materials. These, predictably, are used to build furniture and amenities that will bring more animals into your orbit, in turn unlocking new requests and catalogue options. To build those, you’ll need more crafting materials, which means completing more requests, and the roundabout continues to spin.

Animals are easy to please, usually requiring items that can be obtained without any trouble. You’ll flit between a handful of compact locations in your camper van, tapping them on the map screen to be whizzed there within seconds. Fishing up a horse mackerel at Saltwater Shores is a matter of approaching a shadow in the water, tapping to throw out your line and then again when prompted to reel it in. Capturing a monarch butterfly or fruit beetle on Sunburst Island is equally simple: tap once to begin a stealthy approach, and then once more when you’re told to swing your net. Animal Crossing has never been about challenge, but these activities have traditionally required a modicum of skill and, in some cases, patience. Success here, however, is a foregone conclusion.

Yet if you want these so-called friends to visit your campsite, they become more demanding, insisting you’ve accrued several specific pieces of furniture. The first item we need in order to win the approval of a fussy penguin takes one minute for alpaca handyman Cyrus to craft; the next arrives within three. The wait for the third balloons to seven hours. Inevitably, there’s a way to speed things up: Leaf Tickets are earned via in-game accomplishments, or instantly by spending real-world money. Waiting has always been a part of Animal Crossing, of course. But those timers were hidden from view, while changing the in-game clock was an alternative option for the impatient. No longer.

You’re encouraged to spend those hard-earned tickets elsewhere, too. You’ll need a handful to increase your inventory space, and more for Cyrus to craft two items at once. Unless you’ve got several friends to hand, they’re needed for a rock-smashing minigame at the quarry that rewards you with more bells and crafting materials. Then again, how are you going to afford the exclusive catalogue items that cost 250 Leaf Tickets each? They’re only here for another 40 days, after all. By the time you’ve linked your Nintendo account and achieved a clutch of early stretch goals, you may be able to afford one of them. Accruing as many for the next will take more grinding, but you’ll need a request ticket every time you want animals to give you more tasks.

At this point it becomes clearer than ever that you’re not hanging out with friends, but feeding tokens into vending machines. Brief vignettes where an animal shows you her shell collection, or cooks up a soup, aren’t enough: it’s hard to feel much of an attachment to them when your interactions are limited to a series of transactions. In previous games, incidental dialogue and random events helped give these animals at least a semblance of life, of an existence independent of your presence. Here, their role is reduced to that of a minor NPC in an RPG, offering dull quests for prosaic rewards.

Moments of surprise or delight are sorely few. For each location you’re told exactly what you’ll find. For each piece of furniture you craft, you’re informed which animal will like it. For each of the time-sensitive and persistent goals, you know your reward before you’ve completed it. These are, perhaps, necessary evils: though the economy isn’t as brutally geared towards microtransactions as other free-to-play games, the presence of paid elements seems to have forced Nintendo’s hand. As a result, this is only an Animal Crossing game in the most superficial sense. It looks and sounds the part, and there are fleeting moments where it captures the spirit of kindness that suffused the console and handheld games. But as friendship becomes just another commodity, the whole exercise feels more and more cynical. Somewhere, Animal Crossing has mislaid its soul.

There are moments at which you can admire its assembly, but the whole thing feels grimly mechanical