Animal Crossing - New Horizons: 50 days

Surprise surprise, dear fellow gamers: I'm being playing ACNH casually for the last 50 days, totalling a respectable 40 hours of play — and lo and behold, I really like it. Before I elaborate on that (kinda unexpected) last point, I should explain what I mean by 'playing casually': we're talking about 15 to 30 minutes of daily play, centered mostly on foraging, selling stuff and socializing. It's worth noting that I'm taking my sweet time here, doing just what I feel like doing and nothing more each day, and not worrying one bit about hitting gameplay milestones. If I wanna spend a whole playing session harvesting wood and then call it a day, then that's exactly what I do. As a result, my island's urbanization is progressing at a most languid pace: my second batch of fellow islanders moved in a mere week ago, and I just barely unlocked the Town Hall.

'Playing casually' also involves not obsessing over money-making schemes and debt repayment. The loans are not going anywhere, and it doesn't matter if I pay them in two days or two weeks; what matters is that I have fun with my daily dose of NH and play it my way. One of my little pleasures is to finish each session with an empty inventory, ready to be refilled the next day; another is to fly to a Mystery Island, strip the place of all its resources, fly back and sell all my loot in one fell swoop. I know I'd get more money if I crafted stuff from those resources and sold it; but it's tedious, so I'll rather keep the materials — and the fun — intact. Heck, I don't care about time anyway: I might be in for the long run, so better save some stuff to do for later.

This is undoubtedly the main difference between my runs of New Leaf and New Horizons: this time around, I have things to do — meaning both things I can do and things I want to do. While I struggled to find interesting activities in New Leaf and had absolutely nothing to look forward to, I have a batch of long-term goals in New Horizons on top of my daily grind. NH is much more RPG-ish than NL, to yours truly's delight — heck, paying back Tom Nook alone is enough of a objective to keep me going. As for other differences between New Leaf and New Horizons, I can gladly say that everything — and I mean everything — that bothered me in the former is blissfully gone from the latter. No more villagers that force me to rendezvous with them one real-time hour later, no more boring never-changing Tropical Island, no more guilt-tripping because I didn't play for a couple of days — and boy, is NH all the better for it.

Since I just played for 50 days and 40 hours and just unlocked the Town Hall, the time is perfect to take a small break from NH, take stock of what I've accomplished and build up anticipation about what's to come. Other games are calling me anyway; and as you know, my gaming instinct runs the show! Still, I'm really glad I could already enjoy NH so much, because that was far from being a given considering my history with the series. Hopefully the best is yet to come; until then, dear fellow gamers, I'll see you soon with some fresh gaming goodness!