Animal Crossing

The Dark Side of the Leaf

“Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires.” — William Shakespeare, Macbeth

“What are you playing, Sara?” I’m relaxing by the fire pit in the woodsy backyard of some friends from college. All of us are up to something: roasting marshmallows, reading magazines, shooting the breeze, and in my case, harvesting beetles on a tropical island in Animal Crossing: New Leaf.

The question comes from Amy, a friend of the friends we’re visiting, who drove up with us from the city. She’s fun and nice, and after she asks it I feel the familiar instinct to make sure she doesn’t think I’m a dork. High school is never over, folks.

“Um, Animal Crossing,” I somewhat sheepishly reply.

“Oh my god, they still have Animal Crossing?” My friend Ted perks up. “We used to play that all the time in college.”

“Is it really what it sounds like?” Amy asks. “A bunch of animals roaming around?”

Ted and I exchange glances. “Yes and no.”

On the surface, Animal Crossing: New Leaf is a cutesy kid’s game with talking animals living together in a village. The emphasis is on the idyllic mundane: fishing, catching bugs, wandering around the village looking for buried fossils to donate to the town museum, watering your neighbors’ flowers. Personally, I’ve spent way too much time rearranging the furniture in my house.

But I’ve played for a decent while now, and I’ve glimpsed ACNL’s shadowy underbelly.

There’s Gulliver, a seagull sailor who’s frequently found passed out the shores of my beach. It takes multiple attempts (or a megaphone next to his ear) to rouse him from his stupor. Is he really being washed ashore from a shipwreck over and over again? What a terrible sailor, if that’s the case. Stop wrecking all your ships, Gulliver! Or is he merely what he would likely be in the real world: the town drunk?

There’s Kapp’n, the sea turtle who shuttles the player character to and from the tropical island resort. He sings songs about his wife nagging him and what he’d like to do to the boys who want to date his daughter. In between songs, he tells me how cute I am, and how silky my hair looks. Suddenly I’m hit with the realization that I’m alone with this creep in a dinky motorized rowboat with nothing but open sea stretching out around us.

There’s also the StreetPass feature, which lets you visit the Animal Crossing houses of real-life people you pass by during the course of your day.

I’ve run into some truly bizarre (read: great) houses via StreetPass. I’ve visited candle-lit basement churches with congregations made up entirely of gyroids, all of them lined up in rows facing a giant pipe organ, each one vocalizing and undulating to its own rhythm. I’ve seen a number of mad-scientist laboratories: rooms filled with oddly buzzing machinery, skeletons, and surgical models of human bodies.

I’ve also seen some truly creepy stuff, like the person who had a swastika flag hanging on their living room wall, or the numerous (and I mean numerous) people who’ve set up extra bedrooms with professional-grade video cameras pointed at especially gaudy beds.

Eventually, the opportunity arises to build a Dream Suite in your town, which allows you to visit the towns of other players near and far, no StreetPass required (which only lets you visit houses, anyway). As in a dream, you can interact with the surroundings with no actual lasting effects. Gather all the money bags ye may, but you can’t take them with you.

Unsurprisingly, ACNL players have crafted some incredibly creative towns to explore via the Dream Suite, some with entire stories to tell. Which brings me to Aika.

Aika was designed by a Japanese player of the game before Animal Crossing: New Leaf was released in the West, so fortunately internet commentary on the horror town abounds. Exploring Aika was fun, but it was just as much fun reading other player interpretations afterwards, and it was even more fun to go back and see all the little details I missed.

I’ll avoid a deep analysis of my time with Aika, because I think it’s something that players should experience for themselves, but here are some images that still haunt me: a police station filled with beehives, a maze made of pitfalls and hedges, a single grave surrounded by sweets, two shoes abandoned on a beach, dolls. Lots of dolls.

Every New Leaf player should have at least one Dream Suite nightmare, so visit Aika. You won’t regret it. The dream address is 2D00–002A-49A0.

Do me a favor and go when it’s dark.

This piece originally appeared at Gamemoir.