Northern Lights Living Review
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There’s no point in pretending: it’s legally unique Animal Crossing, a light-hearted country game inhabited by lovable “n” cuddly critters and a variety of commonly used locally crafted, digged, fished, felled and sold Item shop. But even if I knew within seconds of booting how this was going to work, more games of this genre can only be a good thing, right?
need to know
what is it? Animal Crossing: Unofficial PC Edition
Expected payment: $19.99/£15.99
Developer: Miracle Mirror
Publisher: 17 teams
Comment on: i7-10750H, RTX 3070 (laptop), 16GB RAM, SSD
multiplayer game? Do not
Association: steam
For a split second, Hokko Life did feel it had some potential. The character creator is simple and flexible, with multiple skin tones and hairstyles (all customizable) for your completely genderless avatar. The game ditches any connection to the real-world clock in favor of an accelerated internal clock, so a quick snooze can fast-forward an hour or two, while some serious snooze can take an entire week with a few button presses. I thought it would be a real relief to spend time on a healthy life sim that doesn’t force me to sacrifice specific parts of my real life to play it…then the game asked me to build a bridge and I immediately understood why Nintendo’s series insists on slowing me down.
Just like in Alternative Games, a bridge is a major feature that allows you to enter the empty village space across the river. This is something that needs to be learned, collected and crafted before it can finally be placed in a reasonable place that is good for the community. In Hokko Life, the entire sequence takes about 5 minutes. It’s fast and convenient, but at the cost of one of the most important things a game like this should value: letting me have nothing to do and exist in this space just because I can.
This is a recurring problem in North Light Life – the game never dared me to sit around. When I “sleep” for days on end just to build a house faster, none of my neighbors seem to notice, let alone care. Within days, the trees were restored to their original height from the severed stumps, and any holes dug during the day were filled at night.
(Image credit: Wonderscope)
This is an unwelcome helping hand that makes customization difficult. Maybe I want some fairy wood style stumps dotted around. Maybe I’m preparing a flower bed in that grassy corner. It also means no need to struggle to find a balance between local beauty and convenient resources, as the trees and everything else are just landscaping piñatas to hit whenever I need some material.
Many of the tools needed to perform these tasks are obtained through “Mayor Merits” – I can handle a small group of repetitive chores at will. Unfortunately, these important items and bonuses are overshadowed by useless outlines in the merit menu, making it hard to know what to prioritize, and there isn’t always a clear cause-and-effect relationship between work and reward.
One of the mining hat requirements is that my clothes are changed 15 times for unknown reasons. To make matters worse, the rewards are linked together in a random way, which means if I want to get the pickaxe upgrade, I have to fish for 10 treasures and plant 25 trees (among other things) because of being able to find money in the hole Grounding (raise your hand if you’ve seen it somewhere before) and crafting a bronze axe are the two unlockables in front of it. The compulsive busy work takes me away from what I really want to do.
A little personality would go a long way here, but once again Northern Lights failed because everyone was so bland OK. No rudeness, no friction, no weird neighbors, and you can’t quite decide whether you want to send a love letter or go in a hole (you can’t do that in Hokko Life, anyway). The closest these characters get to showing any personality comes from disgusting phrases like “I’ve never had a night so bad that it doesn’t look good in the morning” as if they were a health guru whose only The framing “bad things” reference is one time a barista offered them an oat milk latte because they were all out of almonds. My own avatar wasn’t much better, with most dialogue “choices” being some version of “yes,” delivered in as non-aggressive a way as possible.
The village itself is just as dreary, autumn is almost as green and lush as summer, and only winter can really make a visual effort. Seasonal events haven’t made things any better, mostly because a season has a bug day and a fishing tournament to look forward to, apparently nothing else. No spring picnics, no creepy pumpkins in late fall, no year-end fireworks to look forward to.
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(Image credit: Wonderscope)
(Image credit: Wonderscope)
(Image credit: Wonderscope)
(Image credit: Wonderscope)
(Image credit: Wonderscope)
(Image credit: Wonderscope)
(Image credit: Wonderscope)
(Image credit: Wonderscope)
At least Hokko Life can disappoint life sim fans on a variety of hardware, as the comprehensive graphics settings can easily play on a variety of PCs – it doesn’t look pretty on the lowest settings, but it will work. Unfortunately, this technical ability doesn’t help with the game’s numerous UI issues, including a hand-customized interface that can only be described as a professional 3D artist’s “simple” philosophy and tutorial text boxes that often conflict with the interface they’re trying explained, resulting in unexpectedly skipped text and blurred icons.
Any game so blatantly championing Animal Crossing would better be within swing distance — or at least offer an experience that separates itself from inspiration in some meaningful way, as Temtem and MultiVersus did for As Pokémon and Super Smash Bros do.
Beixing Life Insurance did not achieve either. This is “We Have Animal Crossing at Home”: The Game. It’s a particularly shallow parody on a platform already inundated with original games offering healthy, handmade lives.
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