Animal Crossing: New Horizons gets major update and £5 Switch 2 upgrade

Nintendo released a major update for Animal Crossing: New Horizons last week, along with a £5 Switch 2 upgrade that the publisher says improves how the game looks and runs on the new console. A Guardian writer who returned to their pandemic-era island, Alba, after a long break found it largely intact: a few cockroaches in the basement and some weeds in the snow, but otherwise the shops, museum and residents remained.

The writer reported more than 2 million bells in the bank, used to pay off the final home loan (including about 99,000 bells of interest), and described being given a new museum mission to find Brewster so a cafe can open. The update adds a new hotel run by a family of pirate kappa, easier interior decoration tools (noted as particularly improved when using the Switch 2 controller as a mouse), and small rewards such as tiny Nintendo toys.

There is also a Mr Resetti service that clears items from the ground for terraforming, an L-button grid snap for placing outdoor items like walls and roads, new farming and food recipes, and the ability to decorate shared Slumber Islands with friends while avatars sleep. The writer said they were surprised at how quickly they fell back into the game's rhythm and called the update both soothing and creatively generous.

Key Topics

Culture, Animal Crossing, Alba, Nintendo, Tom Nook, Brewster