Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer is a spin-off game to the now 2 year old game Animal Crossing: New Leaf. Unlike its source material though, Happy Home Designer does away with the debt repaying grind along with the massive amounts of collectible furniture, wildlife, and other oddities in favor of something a bit more streamlined and linear. Your job is no longer to be the mayor of the town, but instead to be an interior (and sometimes exterior) designer for the residents of your animal village.
You find jobs by walking around outside the Nook’s Homes office building and talking to various villagers, or by talking with Isabelle in the main office, who will then give you a very rough idea of what they want their dream project to look like. After some quick fictional paper work and choosing a plot of land to build on, you and your patron are off to start designing their dream home. The majority of your time in Happy Home Designer will be in placing, rotating, and moving furniture around, and the game accommodates this by making the process of shuffling shelving quick and easy. It’s a really cool upgrade from the way furniture moving worked in New Leaf. Instead of having to drag set pieces around with your character you can quickly move things around by using the touch screen.
Many of the game’s assets are reused from New Leaf, which is to be expected. Graphically, there’s nothing new here. The soundtrack is nice though and is reminiscent of the source material and is very relaxing and laid back, echoing that Happy Home Designer is meant to feel like as much a stress-free environment as it’s predecessors. Overall though, these qualities don’t save Happy Home Designer from it’s problems.
The game’s biggest issue is a lack of progression. It feels like Happy Home Designer was created to give a similar feel to New Leaf, in that it’s supposed to be relaxing, but in doing so it missed the system of rewards its parent game has. You don’t earn furniture in Happy Home Designer, instead when you accept a job from a villager you are immediately given everything that fits within the theme they told you they wanted. You don’t earn bells, the Animal Crossing system of currency, in this game because there is nothing to buy, and you don’t really unlock much that feels rewarding after your first few home designs. There’s really nothing to keep the player motivated to continue designing things other than the repetitiveness of moving more virtual furniture around.
One of the bigger components of the original games was something called the Happy Home Academy. Which was a system that judged your house’s appeal based on the theming of furniture, making sure it was all placed properly, and that your house wasn’t a complete mess. Despite sharing a name with it, there is nothing tell you what is good or bad about design in Happy Home Designer. By my third hour into the game I even began to experiment with what exactly I could get away with and what qualified as minimum. For most villagers this is just using the furniture they started with when you arrived at the house and for Isabelle’s public works projects it’s about meeting a minimum requirement based on a checklist. My favorite of these had to be a restaurant I was tasked with designing that only required one kitchen item. I ended up throwing down a dirty sink and a dish rack, calling it a day there, and Isabelle loved it.
Happy Home Designer feels like the skeleton of a game, but not a game in itself. It’s like a sandbox, similar to The Sims, but even a sandbox can be given incentive to keep you coming back. Despite the online interactivity through design challenges, without substantial rewards for the work you put in, it never felt like anything I was doing in the game will ever pay off. I wanted to compare this game to being given a huge box of Legos with no instruction manual, but with Legos your imagination is the limit of what you can put together. Happy Home Designer feels more like a doll house, where everything is given to you and you just put it in its place while an imaginary animal waltzes about in the background.
Approximate play time: 5 hours (unfinished?)
Game obtained through: Purchase