Animal Crossing: Happy Home Paradise is a blessing for ADHD gamers

Hi, I’m Eric Halliday, and I’m neurodivergent. I also have kids who fall on different parts of that spectrum. For us, gaming can be really different.

While games like Skyrim, Fallout, Persona and more come into the gaming world and become huge hits, it misses people like us because it just doesn’t offer the thing we’re looking for, constant dopamine. When you have it, especially with situations like ADHD, it’s one of your main reasons for gaming. Something that sets up small tasks to complete that then rewards you for them is a massive thing for us when it comes to gaming.

In fact, if you’re curious, I recently dropped a list of the best 5 Switch games specifically recommended for gamers with ADHD (or ASD as they got that same dopamine craving).

I can also spot a game that’s going to be a conveyor belt of dopamine from a mile away. I’ve spent the last few decades as a gamer finding out what does it after so long of having games recommended to me that I could not complete because it just didn’t hold my interest regardless of how much I liked it. Hell, I got to the end of Persona 5 Royale after playing it every single night and…just stopped without ever beating it. I just walked away from it.

But there’s something coming out soon that’s going to absolutely feed my craving: Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ Happy Home Paradise, the first paid expansion for the Nintendo Switch game.

Now, on the 3DS, I still have Happy Home Academy and that game got me through some STUFF. Paradise has a similar theme as Academy. You get a job where villagers come for you and request that you design a home for them. In the case of Paradise, it’s a vacation home. That’s pretty much the big thing you do here.

Here’s why this is perfect for us though. Let’s say you’re having a hard time. Hop on, talk to a client, they tell you a particular theme for their home, you look through your available furniture from the academy’s library (you don’t need to worry about your own inventory) and design a home like you’re doing a zen garden.

Then, you hop outside and give the yard some flair and make it look nice and appropriate to the theme.

You finish, you give the client a tour and they reward and thank you. BOOM. That’s a dopamine fix in like 10-15 minutes.

To this day I know I can pick up Happy Home Academy with the knowledge that I can turn it on, get given a creative task I have full control over, and complete the task within a few minutes and it feels great.

And, luckily, if you haven’t picked up Animal Crossing: New Horizons yet, Nintendo announced that Happy Home Paradise will also be stand-alone, meaning you don’t need the base game to play this $24.99 title when it drops November 5th. But if you do have the base game, once you get far enough in Happy Home Paradise, you can design your villager’s homes and make those look nicer too and I cannot wait to mess with it.

As always, let me know what you think. Also, are you neurodivergent? What sort of content would you like to see in the future in regards to gaming? Let us know!