Animal Crossing: New Horizons Memories from Our Discord Community

Nintendo Jump Podcast played Animal Crossing: New Horizons as our Game of the Month for April 2020.  During that time and since, our terrific Discord community members have been submitting some of their favorite memories.  Here's a selection of those snapshots!  (Click to expand)!

Return of the Obra Dinn Review - Dragonflame323

The year is 1807. Four years prior, in 1803, the good ship Obra Dinn had gone missing and been deemed lost at sea after a failed sailing excursion around the Cape of Good Hope, along with all 60 of the ship’s crew and passengers. Their fates presently remain unknown.  You play as the role of an insurance agent investigator for the London office branch of the East India Company. The company has sent word to you that the Obra Dinn has miraculously found its way back to port and given you the task of traveling to Falmouth Port where the ship currently resides in order to assess all the necessary damages of the ship. Most importantly, you are to examine any clues or remaining evidence for what might’ve happened to the people responsible for maintaining this ship.  

Almost immediately to aid you in this endeavor, a mysterious case containing a pocket watch and a book with the title page “Return of the Obra Dinn:  A Catalogue of Adventure and Tragedy” is sent to you. It comes with a preface note signed by the author Henry Evans, expressly written to request the investigator of the ship to use the Memento Mortem pocket watch in tandem with the book to discover the identity and fate of everyone aboard. Though many of the book’s chapters remain blank, determining the fates of everyone on the ship will slowly reveal the contents of each chapter. Thus, the completion of the book is left by a mysterious and somehow knowing stranger in your timely hands.

Such is the intriguing impetus for the narrative in Return of the Obra Dinn, from which the rest of the game follows in neat and concentrated gameplay segments. In these segments, after exploring the ship’s decks or confines and discovering the remains of a person’s corpse, you will then use the aforementioned pocket watch to travel back in time to the very moment of that person’s death.After watching the scene play out, you are then treated as a moving body in a still image of a metaphorical time capsule for that scene, allowing you to move through its environment and analyze each person that was present to piece together the context that might’ve lead to the unfortunate events for that soul’s demise. Once you feel confident that you’ve been able to determine the fate of a person on the ship — universally inscribed within the book as: “Who died?”, “in what manner?” and, if applicable,”by whose hand?” — you can then fill in those blanks, and once three correctly described fates are written, they will be magically typeset into the book as factual events. This narrows down the list of the 60 possible crew or passengers who have perished and moves you closer to unraveling the truth behind these events.  

Dark Souls Review - Dragonflame323

An exceedingly difficult, albeit mostly fair game.  Dark Souls is a 3D action adventure (with light RPG elements) game where you play as a "Chosen Undead" knight, able to wield a variety of weapons and sorceries as you explore segmented areas that open up in a myriad of ways and link up to each other, reminiscent of a 3D Metroidvania in that sense.  Excels at world building, implicit lore that is not outwardly expressed to the player except for a grand cutscene at the beginning that sets the stage.  Tons of epic boss fights with some notable spikes in difficulty around midgame then ends fairly.  Easy to get lost, so exploration and thoughtful observation/interpretation of item descriptions as a means to distill guidance is generally advised.  Some trial and error in world traversal may be required but never noticeably dampens the experience except for one specific area.  The worst part about this game are a few tedious sequences of losing out to boss fights and then respawning at a bonfire that is far enough away that makes the commute a pain, but you can generally avoid enemy mobs pretty easily in this game.

Dragon Score: 9.5/10 (I loved this game)
Time to Beat: Including all optional areas and DLC, it took me about 90 hours.  Expect around 60-80 for the main game