Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer



I feel like gaming is one huge part of my life that I never feature on my blog. I sometimes mention certain games in my favourites posts or maybe in a Happy List, but I've never really dedicated an entire post to a game before. This is mostly because I don't think anyone would read it and although I still kind of think that I wanted to write up a little post on my current favourite game - Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer.

Happy Home Designer is essentially what you'd get if you crossed Animal Crossing with the Build-A-House mode on The Sims. Your character has just landed a job at Nooks Homes, where you'll be the head of the interior design team. Your job is to listen to your client's needs and create them a home according to the theme that they've decided on. You can completely customise the size, exterior and interior of the house, as well as the garden. You can even decide on what plot of land you'd like to build on! This option isn't available until you've created a few homes, but you can always go back and create a garden for the villagers at the beginning if you'd like to.

 

So, the themes. Each villager already has an idea of what kind of decor they'd like in their home, and most of them have pieces of furniture that you have to include in their room somehow. This can be a blessing and a curse. Sometimes the theme is very straight forward, with some villagers asking for things like a beauty salon, café, gym or fashion boutique. Other times they'll give you a very loose theme that you can interpret in your own way, such as being 'surrounded by books' or 'a room to get up early'. A few villagers also specify certain colours they want involved in their homes. I find the themes really useful a lot of the time and it gets a lot easier as the game goes on and you unlock a lot more furniture. At the beginning you kind of have to work with what you've got, but you can always go back and re-arrange things in the future. My biggest issue is including the furniture that the villagers insist on having in their home. This generally boils down to me liking everything to be colour co-ordinated and the fact that I like using furniture all from the same collection as opposed to mixing and matching. I have to admit that sometimes if I really can't make a piece of furniture work for me I hide it behind the house in the garden where no one can see it!

 

Not only do you design and customise homes, you're also in charge of creating the Public Works Projects for the town. These projects include the school, a hospital, a café, a department store and a shop. I really like this aspect of the game as the projects are a lot bigger and there's room to be a bit more creative within your interpretation of the brief. The department store project and café have been my favourites to do so far, although they took me ages!

 

I feel like this game would be great for people that do spend a lot of time creating houses on The Sims etc, and that like to have the customisation option in games. Granted it's not the kind of game that I could sit there for hours and play, it's more like something you could do if you were on a train journey or whilst your bath was running. It does get a bit repetitive because you're essentially just doing the same thing over and over again but I like using my imagination and creating all of the different homes with different themes and feels.

 

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