With the exception of the touch screen controls for home design, and a bit more freedom in choosing layouts for the buildings, there isn’t any furniture here that couldn’t also be found in New Leaf. That lack of real requirements might explain why everyone in Nook’s Homes is listless and lazy, but it also makes the experience feel incomplete. The game suggests the player take it seriously, but they’re under no obligation to do so, and comes with no penalty if they don’t. If the client wants “A themed hotel,” for example, and packages a nice bed and bathtub, the player can simply leave the bathtub and bed in the middle of a room, with the flooring and wallpaper still bare foundations, and submit the house as-is, with no further additions to interior or yard. The villagers that populate the bar will behave as though it’s a restaurant, even though it plays grungy rock music and is lit in varying shades of neon.īecause the requirements are so simple and baseline, the whole design aspect feels a little bit directionless. Designing the restaurant so it looks like a seedy bar, for example, is perfectly possible. Technically following the rules is the only requirement, especially for the city buildings, but ignoring the theme is never penalized. Client jobs will come with pre-boxed furniture that fits that client’s style, usually two or three items along a theme. Isabelle’s jobs, for the city’s facilities, will have minimal requirements that demand certain types of furniture (beds, chairs, tables, cash registers, etc.), but for the most part, freedom of design is given to the player. Tapping furniture will rotate it, dragging the stylus across the screen will let the player select multiple objects at once, and objects appear with different symbols to indicate if they can be put on top of one another or if they can have things put on them.Įvery design job will come with its own requirements and new furniture that fits the theme of the place being designed. The central design mechanic in Happy Home Designer is very polished, giving the player a floorplan on the bottom screen, with the ability to select furniture from catalogs at the top of the screen, then drag them into place on the floor plan directly. The only other person in the office that seems to do any work is Isabelle, who stops by in the mornings offering contract work from the town hall, putting the player in charge of designing municipal buildings like schools, hospitals, restaurants, shops, and cafés. It’s up to the player’s initiative to not only find clients, but to pick out which lot they’ll get, bring them to their house, and finally design the yard, exterior, and interior. Nook spends his workdays out on the golfing green, Digby and Lyle always seem to be in the office industriously doing nothing, and Lottie never moves from her computer. In addition to Lyle, Nook’s Homes is filled with several familiar faces from previous Animal Crossing games, including Happy Home Showcase’s Digby, fan favorite town hall liaison Isabelle, and the infamous loan-shark-turned-realtor Tom Nook, owner of the business.Īlthough the office is industrious, with people milling around frequently, very little work ever happens outside of the player’s input. Clients are assigned to the player for the first few missions, tutorials for the game’s primary design mechanics, and later players could roam the city’s streets looking for potential clients interested in a new home.Īs a new hire to Nook’s Homes, the player is put under the tutelage of a seemingly hard-working pink otter named Lottie, the niece of Happy Home Academy’s Lyle. Where the existing titles put players in the role of real-time town inhabitant and part-time employee, Happy Home Designer eschews the existing formula and instead casts you a new hire to budding business Nook’s Homes.Įmployees at Nook’s Homes are in charge of taking in clients, and using their skills and abilities to design the interiors (and later exteriors) of homes for the villagers in the rustic plains, snow-capped mountains, beaches, deserts, and riverfront properties. Something about the interplay of open, transparent glass and dividing, impassable barrier strikes me as a fascinating aspect of design.Īn important design aspect, as Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer is a pretty big departure from the existing Animal Crossing titles. Inside the sleek, invisible walls of the towering glass upon its blanche-white base, I have built many things: Corner offices, ominous red buttons, reading rooms of luxurious decadence, and even bathrooms. There are folding screens and solid, opaque panels for dividing rooms, but I didn’t find them as alluring as the glass. My favorite item in Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer is a glass panel.