10 best gaming surprises of 2021 (and 5 terrible ones)

01) Great Moment – Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ Update and Happy Home Paradise double an already great game

Despite the fact that 50% of my articles seem to be about different elements about Animal Crossing New Horizon, I had a feeling the game had died out. I thought everything that was going to happen had happen and the next closest thing we’d have to an update would be whatever year the next Animal Crossing came out.

Nintendo straight up proved me wrong hard.

First off, they dropped the 2.0 update which was the biggest Animal Crossing update ever. Hundreds of new items were added. Gyroids were brought back. Brewster and The Roost came back. Kapp’n came back along with new islands with new items. Harv’s Island suddenly became this massive co-op with characters like Redd and Kicks having daily stands. The island also brought back characters like Katrina and Tortimer. They also added farming. And with the things you could farm you could also cook. And this was just the free stuff.

At the same time, they also dropped Animal Crossing’s (arguably) first paid add-on. Happy Home Paradise is a DLC add-on to New Horizons as well as a spiritual successor to the 3DS game Happy Home Academy. In it you fly to a completely new island where you design vacation homes for other villagers. You also design facilities like clothing stores, restaurants, and hospitals which you can actually use in order to get new items.

As you design more homes, in addition to it being a constant stream of dopamine, you also learn to build and do new things that you can bring back to your home island with you. Suddenly you can make accent walls or room partitions. You can make mid-level counters. You can add soundscapes to a room if you want it to sound like they live in the city or a creepy mansion. You can even polish things to add a series of special effects like sparkles, dry ice steam, smoke, and much more.

Even better, once you get to a certain point, Tom Nook finds out about your side hustle and brings the idea to your home island, allowing you to actually design the homes of all your villagers, allowing you to go all-out turning every house on your island into a perfectly fitting dream home for each villager.

All this completely tripled the life of the game as it opened up so many various options and it’s created a tool for mind-blowing levels of creativity.