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IKEA Broke Me, But Then ‘Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer’ Fixed Me

Designing for animals is way more fun than designing for a mass-produced existence.
Image: Nintendo

Of all the trials that newly-moved New Yorkers submit themselves to, there's little that compares to the collective anxiety capital that is IKEA—the One IKEA in Brooklyn that serves a metropolitan area of some 20 million people.

Strollers, screaming kids, people sleeping on display beds, that customer who just ordered five hot dogs. Arguments flying and relationships falling apart because you and your roommate can't decide on a cheap sofa to bring back. Am I ready for this pain? Yes. Hell yes I am.

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The store is designed to be a Dantean slog; it takes you through a fantasy catalog of spick and span prefabricated rooms and you can't reach the exit until you've seen every room IKEA's designers throw at you. To give into an IKEA room display is to give into the idea that lifestyles can simply be mass-produced and atomized into shipping boxes, and there are people who design specifically so that can happen.

And I, a card-carrying masochist, became the person I've come to hate: a home designer. But this time for fictional animal people.

Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer does away with the series' time-tested formula. Usually, you're a human in a growing village of talking animals, repaying debts to Tom Nook, the series' mascot and loan shark, for building your house up. Meanwhile, you're decorating, making a living, and getting friendly with the neighbors. Animal Crossing: New Leaf was big in the sense that it was a quotidian slog—there was an emphasis on amassing more and more things: money, collectibles, sets over the course of months.

Now none of that matters. Only your decorating sense matters, because Nintendo stripped much of the game down—the basic economy is gone, the open world exploration is gone, and even the 24-hour cycle is gone. You can only navigate to your office, facilities, and your clients' houses and yards, all of which can become canvases for your budding design career.

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It's a refreshing take on a game that would previously ask that you play during the day to attend events or get certain items. And while I took weeklong breaks, there was a slowly building anxiety that my save file would end up a weedy garbage town where no one would remember me. The once foreign idea of an Animal Crossing game where I can choose my hours and not be penalized for being a noncommittal flake works fantastically.

And the game gets rid of an inventory too. The idea of owning stuff is done away with. You're no longer the boss of your own house—you're the boss of everyone else's. You can plop furniture, wallpapers, anything into existence. Actually designing a house based on someone else's simple wants is actually zen-like—they're actually attached to personal items and usually follow through with a theme that matches up with their personality. The most fun I've had was decorating a sloppy character's house because, honestly, same.

There's a comfort that comes from knowing that there's a complete set of things that go in their proper place, and things belong together. There's also some anxiety from squashing so many things into shoebox-sized animal houses, but the satisfaction that comes from putting things in their proper place isn't that much different or lesser than any satisfaction I've had getting things to fit in my own shoebox-sized New York apartment.

Should you get this? The answer is: perhaps. If you have a home life and find that your hours aren't meshing up and you're on a tight schedule, and are perhaps sick of home design shopping and assembling like I've grown to be, this game will be worth your time.

And unlike The Sims, where you cater to the physical and emotional whims of digitally generated people perhaps too similar to ourselves, Happy Home Designer asks you to design to make someone, well, happy. Not to serve any purpose. Happy Home Designer characters need creature comforts, not necessarily showers or garbage cans. And as humans I think we're similarly more enamored with the idea of having a happily designed lifestyle rather than deal with the ruckus of upkeep.

You shouldn't not get it because it's not quite the Animal Crossing you know. It's the Animal Crossing that believes that homes should be a thing you own and not the other way around.