The release of Animal: New Horizons seems to take place at the most opportune moment. Many countries and cities are trying to protect themselves from the coronavirus by closing schools, shops and offices, which forces millions of people to stay at home for several weeks. A trip to an uninhabited island, where your second, parallel life will begin - with new acquaintances and the construction of an ideal habitat, will help brighten up the anticipation of the next school or work day.

Unlike the previous installments of the series, in New Horizons, the journey begins from absolute zero. The permanent raccoon Tom Nook and his nephews Timmy and Tommy offer the player to choose one of four islands, which differ only in the way rivers and reservoirs are located there. Then a base is erected for the raccoon, on which he will speak with news and receive guests (in other words, a tent on a small site), and after that you can pick up a place where your home will be located. By the way, it is worth immediately answering a question that worries many - of course, there is no need to play the previous parts of Animal Crossing before launching a new one.

In a sense, and for veterans of the series, the passage of New Horizonswill be full of surprises. This is due to the advent of crafting - collecting resources, studying recipes and creating items in the workshop will, apparently, throughout the Friv game. It all starts with the simplest axes, nets and fishing rods, which break after ten uses, but very soon it becomes possible to collect more durable tools in your inventory.

Crafting and the ability to get recipes from time to time make the new Animal Crossing a Friv game in which you continue to spend time, even when all the story quests are completed. In the first three days, which I am allowed to talk about in this text, clear tasks were given: choose a place where the scientist would live, choose a place for a bridge, choose a place for a store. But nothing was immediately built - Nook always asked to wait until the next morning. And the time here corresponds to the real one, with seasons and changing times of day. If we entered in the evening, it will be dark. If you turn on the game in winter, it will snow.

However, even if Nuka's tasks are completed, here you will find something to do with yourself. I devoted my first evening on the island to fishing and catching insects - I just ran for four hours throughout the accessible territory and tried to catch as many butterflies and crucians as possible, collecting shells on the beach along the way. The process is very simple, everything is done literally with two buttons, but it is very difficult to come off. At the same time, the "Atlas of living creatures" was filled in, in which each discovered individual was entered. All of them are available only at certain times of the day or in specific months.

The second day consisted of about the same - a biologist came to the island, wishing to open his own museum, and he willingly took away the discovered fauna. If some fish and butterflies were repeated, I took them to the store for sale - absolutely everything is ready to buy here, even useless weeds that you accidentally pick up from the ground while trying to pick up something else. And there is a lot of rubbish to sell, because Nook built a house for the hero for a reason - you need to return his money. Fortunately, he will not flood messages and attract collectors, so you can pay off the debt at any time. But the sooner you do this, the faster you will have access to the next increase in living space, after which you will have to repay the loan again.

At the same time, another option was opened - rotating achievements, for which they give out valuable currency. There are two currencies in total: dinis and miles. The first one can be earned only by selling the things found (sometimes buried treasures come across, but rarely), and the second one you get for completing various tasks. There are long-playing quests, divided into stages (catch 10 fish, then 50, then 100, and so on), and there are a number of endless simple tasks. Collect five butterflies, chop down one tree, sell ten shells, spend such and such an amount in the store - almost all of them are very light and are performed literally on the go, changing immediately after completion. Even when you are asked to catch some kind of beetle, there is a high probability that you will not have to purposefully hunt for it - sooner or later it will catch your eye.

You can spend miles in a special Nook store, where everything is sold - from improvements for inventory (you should purchase an increase in the number of slots first, otherwise you will be tortured) to hairstyles, clothes, accessories (glasses, backpacks, sleep masks) and all kinds of home decorations ... The assortment grows as it progresses - on the third day, boardwalk and brick fences became available to me, which it was not yet possible to create on my own. Nearby is the "Nuka Catalog", where items of clothing, furniture, wallpaper and everything-everything-everything received earlier are entered. So there is no need to keep the sneakers found at the beginning of the Friv game forever - sell them calmly, then redeem them if necessary.

The main product in the Nuka store is a ticket, thanks to which you can fly from the airline office located on the shore to a random island. When everything has been studied and found on your own for today, it is best to go on a journey to an unknown location. Bamboo can grow there, palms can stand, fish and insects that do not live in your area can be found - just a paradise for those who want to collect resources. If there are no iron nuggets lying next to the house, they will definitely be found on the neighboring island, and you manage to cut trees there without a twinge of conscience - you still will not return there. And there are also new friends who respond positively to the invitation to live on your island. So far, none of them have moved to me, but I’ll hardly have to wait long.

New characters appear around the house, and at completely random moments. For one of them, I fulfilled a small assignment, for which, after leaving, he thanked me with a gift that was in the mail. Another turned out to be a merchant who brings in valuable goods on Sunday morning and soon leaves the island. They say that the cost of these goods when they are sold the next day will be several times higher - I hope I did not buy all the money in vain. By the third, I had to fly by plane to see his photo studio and listen to a lot of explanations about how it is arranged and what to do there in general.

This is how you spend your time in New Horizons - going about your business and reacting to unexpected things. In the process of collecting seashells on the beach, you can stumble upon a bottle with a note, and inside you will find a recipe for some object for a room. Balloons with gifts attached to them periodically fly over the ground - you shoot at them with a slingshot and you get something useful. You shake the trees, collect the branches falling out of the crowns, and sometimes you come across a bee hive and, bitten, go to the store for medicine. You go fishing, cast your line and catch... a tin can. But it doesn't matter, the hero immediately comes up with a recipe for succulents and can create a beautiful decoration for the home from a jar and weeds.

You get involved in the process instantly, and it is difficult to resist the urge to enter the Friv game several times during the day - suddenly you miss something. The game is not designed to sit in it all the time from morning to evening. Even at the very beginning, this is not necessary. Of course, you can create a dozen nets and sell the caught butterflies in order to pay off the loan on the same day, but there is no hurry. If you like to gather resources and trade, do it. If the plot tasks are completed, and there is no desire to "farm", then there is no need. If the house is already large enough and you want to decorate the walls, put a prettier bed, and place a table with chairs behind the house, then the workshop is available at any time.

It also helps that New Horizons looks wonderful, both in portable and stationary mode. The position of the sun affects the shadows, when the wind is strong, the foliage on the trees sways, fearful bugs run away at the sight of the hero. The characters look cute, the textures on their models even have the illusion of relief, so the fluffy and feathered creatures do not seem like dolls come to life. And furniture and other decorations look great both in the house and outside.

Well, the main thing for the Russian audience is the presence of full-fledged localization. I didn’t compare the translation with the English version, but from the first impression it seems that it was done at a high level. When catching a fish or a beetle, a joke associated with the name of the animal is written (often rhymed), and in dialogues with Nuk and other heroes, the cases are always correctly used, about which I was worried before the release. It turned out that in vain - they did not begin to avoid cases and did not rebuild for the sake of this sentence, all names and denominations are inclined depending on phrases.

Disadvantages are very difficult to find, but I managed to find one slightly annoying element. Here, unfortunately, you cannot make several identical items at the same time - you have to watch the animation of creation every time. However, when such a trifle turns out to be the only discovered drawback, it makes no sense to pay much attention to it.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons will get better every day . New tasks will entail new goods in stores, new acquaintances will make the island livelier. Later, terraforming is even unlocked - it will be possible to change the appearance of the island, destroying rocks and "rearranging" rivers. With the onset of the next season, new animals will appear, and in winter everything will be covered with snow. The festivities will be accompanied by special events with exclusive items that won't be available soon after the events. The first such entertainment is promised right on the day the game is released, March 20.

Therefore, it will be possible to evaluate all the content offered in the Friv game in at least 365 days, when March 13 again comes and it will be exactly a year since I received a copy of the game and settled on the island. Perhaps I will even devote a separate material to this and summarize. But the first three days were, without exaggeration, wonderful. So far, everything indicates that Animal Crossing: New Horizons can be included in the list of the main games on the Nintendo Switch - if everything started so great, then it's scary (in a good way) to imagine what will happen here in a week, a month or a year. It's just a pleasure to spend time in the game, and what you do - make furniture, save money, or just sit at night on a stump from a felled tree - it doesn't matter at all.

Pros: charming visual style; understandable crafting system and a huge number of recipes; the ability to quickly earn currency in different ways; the Friv game is captivating, even when there is nothing to do according to the main "plot"; various minor characters - each with its own character; mountains of possibilities for customization, and not only clothes, but also faces with hair; big plans to support the Friv game in the future.

Cons: You cannot create more than one item at a time in the workshop.