Paradise Lost: Transforming Animal Crossing Into a Nightmarish Hellscape

Animal Crossing: New Horizons, the latest entry to Nintendo’s series of cutesy town-building simulation games, has released during a moment in time when a lot of people are desperate for some kind of comfort.  In theory, it provides order and predictability while our minds are battered by the senselessness of living through a terrifying pandemic and its many physical, economic, and emotional implications. 

Rather than try to use the game as a digital salve for this frightening new era, my idea was to lean into the horror by creating some approximation of a world gone mad using New Horizons. Over the last few weeks, I’ve tried to channel the red-hot id of a truly terrible moment into a virtual world designed for happiness. I wanted the walking, talking animals of myNew Horizons island to swallow even the tiniest mouthful of the bitter air we breathe and see how they would react to the destabilizing influence of a player who, for no good reason, decided to make their tropical idyll into a place void of logic and order.

Thus, I created a helltown presided over by a cartoon boy named Behemoth, in homage to the Great Beast himself. Rictus-grin permanently attached to his lamplight-eyed head, he would bring a taste of Boschian anarchy to their intricately programmed island world.

The first step was to create Behemoth himself. Given Animal Crossing’s childlike human characters, he ended up looking a lot like The Omen’s Damien without much effort at all. Once this was done, Behemoth was introduced to his fellow villagers, promoted to an advisory role without doing anything to prove himself, and given the task of naming his new home. Inspired by the chaotic underworld I wanted him to create for his fellow villagers, he volunteered the name Sheolville, named after the Hebrew land of the dead.

The real question brought on by embarking upon this journey to make the island totally miserable was how far New Horizons would let me take things. After allowing Behemoth to stand around next to a bonfire in his underwear, thinking his unknowable thoughts, I decided to start off by observing his neighbors’ daily routines.

This presented several good opportunities to follow them around with one of the first tools New Horizons provides: a makeshift axe.

The other villagers were too alert and good-natured to either allow themselves to be either surprised or, stranger still, appear at all put off by the unblinking child stalking them with a deadly weapon. Thankfully, Behemoth was given the task of finding plots of land suitable for his neighbors’ new homes, which allowed for plenty of opportunities to interfere with the first steps of Sheolville’s urban planning by cramming houses together into an unnecessarily crowded block constantly filled with the visual and sonic annoyance of ongoing construction projects.

This was a start, but not nearly good enough. Fortunately, around this point, Behemoth, now clad in a custom designed shirt with a pentagram on the front and an inverted cross on the back, had begun to earn his way into an ever-expanding catalog of new items to buy from the local shops. Having gained access to all kinds of lovely furniture, I used his money to purchase a bunch of air conditioners, electrical generators, and tricycles. Each of these could be arranged in such a way that they formed trash barriers that locked the villagers into their homes.

There was more work to be done, but, while running around the island creating these barriers, I discovered that Behemoth could send postcards to his neighbors, too. This opportunity was too good to pass up, so I had him scribble out a few friendly notes and mail them along—one with a single rock attached as a present.

After waiting a day to see how the villagers would respond, however, I was disappointed to discover that they really didn’t mind these transparent attempts to traumatize or excommunicate them. One replied with a bubbly message thanking Behemoth for the letter. Clearly, he needed to step up his work needed if these villagers were going to crack under the pressure of their increasingly difficult lives.

It was around this time that, at last, the boy demon found instructions for how to craft his very own jail bars and barbed wire fences. This, along with the ever-expanding list of items he could craft from Sheolville’s natural resources or buy from its shops, made it possible to accelerate (and improve) his work.

And yet, somehow, the island continued to delight everyone nearby. New villagers arrived to make their homes there. Behemoth continued to put down barricades that would keep them stuck inside, but it didn’t seem to interrupt their cheer one bit. Every few days, they’d appear, running up to their evil overlord to chat casually about hobbies, the weather, and anything else that didn’t have to do with the obvious fact that he was actively working to ruin their lives.

Now, when opening the game, New Horizons’ title screen would often show the villagers pacing around their open air prisons like caged tigers, but still they would smile and greet Behemoth when, through some trick of the programming, they’d slip out from their confines to go wandering around the island. Nothing could stop them. They were too optimistic to be beaten down, not even by the son of Satan himself.

Unsure what to do next, I guided Behemoth on a trip to a dog-man photographer’s home studio. There, he was overcome with dreams of how best to use the tools he’d been given by Sheolville and its shops. His balloon-shaped cranium soon grew swollen with scenes from his favorite horror movies and visions of the hated neighbors at long last imprisoned for good.

There was nothing left to do but to make these ideas a reality. Back on Sheolville, with no time to spare, Behemoth set about his task, laboring day and night until the dark work before him was complete. First, a barbed wire perimeter was set up around the town hall. A monkey-person watched on, unconcerned with the first stage of what was unfolding before him.

Next, this fence had to be extended down all the way down to the island’s only point of entry: the wooden dock that serves as its airport terminal. From here, not only would visitors be stuck inside a makeshift prison pathway, but they’d also be kept locked away on the east side of the village where nothing exists but a crowded assortment of shops and homes, all surrounded by garbage cans and constantly blazing bonfires.

Behemoth, concentrating so fully on his task that he didn’t even notice the sweat soaking through his pentagram shirt, labored all through the morning, an apple-cheeked Daedalus feverishly constructing a labyrinth to imprison the minotaur of his cute, harmless, friendly neighbors.

The town hall encircled, Behemoth’s hands presumably bleeding freely from hours of work twisting the spiky wire across wooden poles, his work was done. One villager stood trapped behind the senseless bars of the downtown prison. The others strolled back and forth on the other side of the impenetrable fencing. They, too, were trapped. The island’s supply of oranges, wildflowers, fish, insects, and, most of all, freedom, have been denied to them.

Behemoth sat down in the outdoor lounge he’d constructed. He reflected on his work as the villagers stood behind him, so close but forever apart from the free cotton candy, complementary vending machine snacks, and comfortable wicker chairs set up just outside their prison. His final triumph seemed to be at hand.

And yet, something still tells Behemoth that these animal people’s spirits are impossible to crush. No matter what he did in the past, they managed to forgive him—to put aside whatever he’d done to destroy their simple island lives and embrace him in communal celebrations.

Nothing can stop them, he—and I—realize now. The villagers are totally unflappable. Even when one of their only neighbors is a petty tyrant, intent on blocking them from interacting with the ecosystem they depend on to survive, flooding their yards with mechanical junk, and turning even the first step outside their doors in the morning into an obstacle course that ends in a giant prison complex, they persevere. It seems we can learn from their resolve. 

If the villagers can keep on living in spite of a tiny human’s love of nothing but vindictiveness and chaos, why can’t we? If they can keep their spirits high while everything around them tries to crush them, surely we can endure our troubles, too. The villagers could endure living through two and a half weeks of daily effort devoted to disrupting their lives. Surely we can weather hard times, too.  Maybe, in the end, this is a better way to take something positive away from playing New Horizons than simply viewing it as a utopian escape from reality.

Or, maybe, actually, these computer-controlled animals just don’t have the programming necessary to launch the revolution that would free them of Behemoth once and for all—to extinguish the evolutionary mishap that gave him life—and that’s something that should make us pity them.