Tag Archives: animal crossing

Another A-maze-ing Visit to Animal Crossing: New Horizons!

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There are plenty of terrific video game puzzles out there. Whether you’re talking about video games where the vast majority of the gameplay is puzzle solving (like Myst, Portal, The Witness) or games in other genres that still use puzzles in creative ways (Resident Evil, Silent Hill, Uncharted), puzzles are part of the fabric of video games.

But sometimes, it’s almost more interesting when people introduce puzzly elements to non-puzzle games, because it shows off the creativity, cleverness, and skill of the designer.

People have designed escape room-style puzzles in Super Mario Maker (not to mention working calculators!) and Minecraft is known for its user-generated puzzly challenges.

But I don’t think I ever expected Animal Crossing: New Horizons to end up as a refuge for puzzly minds.

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For the uninitiated, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a game where each player gets their own island, on which they can build a house, create their own paradise, and interact with fellow players. You can collect animals, plants, fruit, and other resources to craft items. There are tasks to complete, and more characters will arrive to explore your island.

We previously reported on Animal Crossing back in May of 2020 when guest blogger Jen Cunningham discussed their May Day event. During the event, game designers created a special island with a maze and a series of tasks for players to complete as they solved the twisty turny path before them. It was a big success, one of many for the game in 2020.

But as it turns out, that’s not the only maze to be found if you go island-hopping in this popular game.

No, a user named Avery Monsen spent about two weeks turning his island into a diabolical labyrinth of his own design. After deep diving into the game, the creation of Avery’s maze was driven by two factors:

1. It was more fun than the traditional game play
2. It would make the game virtually unplayable, which would make it easier to put down for a while.

And it looks like his plan succeeded. Once the maze was finished, he put the game away. (He recently returned to the game to check out a programming update.)

Apparently, the maze is complex enough to cause travel from any key location to any other key location to last ten minutes. And for a game where you’re free to explore wherever, ten minutes to get from place to place is an eternity.

“I wouldn’t say I forgot about my maze, but I definitely forgot how much of a hassle it is. It’s a nightmare,” Monsen said. “So, I took a few screenshots and posted them to my Twitter. I was very quickly flooded with people who were impressed by my dedication and terrified by my obsession. Both of these reactions are valid.”

He has shared the address code so that other players can visit his island and try their hand at his now-famous labyrinth. “I hope people enjoy my island and I hope it doesn’t make me look totally nuts,” he said.

Who knows what other puzzly works are lurking out there in the world of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, just waiting to be revealed?

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A Spooky Video Game Urban Legend: Solved!

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It’s strange that puzzles and games don’t seem to have urban legends attached to them, even though they’ve been with us for so long.

I mean, sure, there’s palindromes believed to have magical powers… and cursed puzzle boxes like in the Hellraiser films… but I can’t think of any pervasive urban legends around modern puzzles and games.

It strikes me as odd because there are plenty about video games, which are a relatively new art form, generally speaking. There are stories about haunted Legend of Zelda cartridges and sinister destructive secret characters in Minecraft.

There’s the supposed Madden Curse (where athletes who appear on the cover of Madden games end up suffering poor seasons or getting injured), and even the conspiracy stories about an arcade game called Polybius that government agents used to download game data from in the 1980s.

Recently, an urban video game legend was put to rest.

It starts, as many urban legends, bits of folklore, and spooky stories do, with a hazy recollection. There’s a forum on Reddit cleverly titled “Tip of my joystick,” where people can post details about a game whose name they don’t remember, and the other posters help them remember it.

The post was about one of those complete-a-task/farming-style games, like Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, or Farmville.

Except it had an appropriately sinister twist, like something out of a Hitchcock movie or an episode of a weekly crime drama like Criminal Minds or Bones.

At one point, the player gets into an argument with their wife and kills her. The game continues as a farm simulator, except you periodically have to hide the body from police.

This was clearly meant to be a darkly tongue-in-cheek game mechanic, almost Weekend at Bernie’s-esque. Obviously, this game wouldn’t be for everyone. You might even think people were purposely creating a dark urban legend of their own by making this post in the first place.

But the fellow posters of r/tipofmyjoystick tried their darnest to figure out the identity of this game. Some asked questions for further details, while others suggested possible games, but were quickly proved wrong.

The game remained unidentified for several years, coming to be known as “that evil farming game,” even getting its own dedicated reddit forum.

The original poster, at one point, finally concluded at one point that they must have dreamt the game, or misremembered something while half-asleep.

In the years before the Internet became the prolific searching and information tool it is now, I had plenty of experiences describing random TV episodes or b-movies that people presumed I had made up or dreamt up while home sick on the couch from school. (One particular episode of MacGyver involving a hidden temple with traps and a giant blue gemstone, for instance, was a joke in my group of friends for years until I could finally point to the episode on Netflix or the episode page on IMDb to prove its existence.)

So what was this “evil farming game” the original poster remembered? Was it real? Or a sleepy invention?

Well, it turns out it was neither.

Diligent posters and game fans went looking through the video library of a YouTuber called Vinesauce after the original poster mentioned watching it often. And they found a video where Vinesauce jokingly suggested a farming style game with the grim addition to the gameplay.

The original poster misremembered this as a real game, and started the ball rolling on an Internet video game urban legend that lasted half a decade.

It turns out, our brains are good at this sort of thing — convincing ourselves that what we half-remember is real — and this urban legend evolved as something similar to the Mandela Effect, a mass misremembering of something.

Two prominent examples of the Mandela Effect from recent history are the Berenstain Bears (which many people swear should be the BerenSTEIN bears) and the movie Shazaam staring Sinbad, which never existed. (They’re misremembering the Shaquille O’Neal genie movie Kazaam from 1996.)

So, this spooky mystery was solved, but perhaps a more interesting mystery — how the original poster’s brain created this fake game in his memory — stands in its place.

I found this story both fascinating and charming — if a little morbid — and I thought it would be the perfect puzzly conclusion to the Halloween season.

Have you ever misremembered something like this, fellow puzzlers, or experienced something similar to the Mandela Effect? Or are there any urban legends about puzzles and games that we should know about? Let us know in the comments section below! We’d love to hear from you.

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Puzzles Come to Animal Crossing for May Day!

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[Image courtesy of Nintendo.]

The latest edition of the video game franchise Animal Crossing — New Horizons — has been out for a few months now. But recently, they ventured into the world of puzzles as a special promotion.

Thankfully, friend of the blog Jennifer Cunningham — puzzler, artist, musicologist, and former Tabletop Tournament Champion — has returned to the blog with the lowdown on the recent May Day event.

So, without further ado, let’s turn things over to Jen for her piece on Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

Possibly one of the most anticipated video game releases of the year, Animal Crossing: New Horizons arrived at just the right time, hitting Nintendo Switch consoles at the end of March.

The latest installment in the Animal Crossing series finds its players arriving at a beautiful island paradise. There are multiple goals in the game including expanding your home, gaining wealth, collecting insects and fish to donate to the local museum (or to sell for profit), and of course improving your island’s appeal so that popular singer/songwriter K.K. Slider will play a concert for you and the other residents.

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[Image courtesy of VG 24/7.]

Players across the world have gone wild for this game, making it their entertainment of choice while stuck at home at this uneasy time. The social aspect of the game, which allows players to virtually invite their friends to their islands, share gifts and resources, and even to chat, has helped many feel less isolated.

And the makers of Animal Crossing are doing their part to keep the game interesting and engaging for players who have likely been obsessively playing since the release date. As months change, so do your island’s insects and fish, and special events ensure players keep coming back. An Easter-themed event called Bunny Day saw players collecting eggs to build themed objects, and more recently an environmentally centered event called Nature Day encouraged activities related to planting trees and flowers.

May Day on May 1st was part of the Nature Day celebration. Starting on this day, everyone’s favorite raccoon/tanuki mogul Tom Nook gave players a special ticket for a May Day Tour on a special getaway island via Dodo Airlines. Unlike other island excursions that players may take, this particular tour package had an unusual surprise. Players were transported to an island with a puzzly secret: a maze!

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[Image courtesy of Jennifer Cunningham.]

Normally Animal Crossing doesn’t involve much in the way of problem solving — it’s a pretty straightforward collect-and-build-style game — so to challenge players with a puzzle was a surprise.

The entire May Day Tour island is composed of a hedge maze, blocked off in spots by boulders, trees, and shrubs. Using a simple shovel supplied at the maze entrance, players must collect resources such as fruit, wood, and iron ore to build more tools and make their way through the maze.

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[Image courtesy of Newsweek.]

In addition, players could collect “Bell vouchers” which can be traded in for Bells (the game’s currency). At the end of the maze awaited the main prize as supplied by a mysterious returning character popular to fans of the game’s previous generations. (I admit as a new fan, this wasn’t a big draw for me, but for die-hard fans, this was a very big deal.)

The maze was intuitive, and it didn’t take long for me to figure out how to navigate it, although it does involve a lot of backtracking to meet the necessary steps in the correct order.

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[Image courtesy of Super Parent.]

That said, the maze did offer some challenges. I completed my first attempt fairly quickly, but failed to maintain enough fruit in my stores to remove three boulders and access a group of bell vouchers. (For a bit of context, consuming fruit boosts players’ strength, allowing them to dig up whole trees or break boulders).

Thankfully the maze offered a reset option. It took me about three attempts to finally perform every necessary action in the correct order to collect all of the maze’s prizes.

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[Image courtesy of Animal Crossing World.]

Overall, while not the most challenging of puzzles, it was refreshing to do some problem solving in a game that can admittedly get a little repetitive. There was a hint within the game’s dialog that there may be more islands of this sort, and I do hope that is true. Likely these will be included in future events to keep players coming back for more.

If you haven’t jumped on the Animal Crossing bandwagon yet and want to try your luck at the maze before it’s too late, the May Day event runs through May 7.

Thank you Jen for that marvelous report!

Will you be participating in the May Day Animal Crossing event, fellow puzzlers and PuzzleNationers? Let us know in the comments section below. We’d love to hear from you!

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