Animal Crossing New Horizons: Happy Home Paradise review

For a long time now, fans of Animal Crossing New Horizons have been craving new content. The recently released 2.0 update added coffee aficionado Brewster; boat trips with Kapp’n; cooking; new furniture to spend those unused Nook Miles; and loads more. Much of the new content is pretty decent, however, I shan’t be exercising in front of Residential Services any time soon. As for paid content, Nintendo has released Happy Home Paradise to coincide with the update. Players venture to a new island where they get paid to decorate new dwellings for those villagers who want a vacation home to escape the day-to-day life of sitting on benches and chasing bugs.

Happy Home Paradise: Attending the needs of the client

Happy Home Paradise isn’t going to appeal to everyone. What it boils down to is whether or not you want to spend your time furnishing new homes with plenty of freedom. The actual act of enriching empty plots of land and houses is pretty satisfying. After visiting Lottie, an otter with an abundance of energy, she gives you a job to go out and find villagers who have come to the island with their own ideas of how they want their potential cribs to be furnished. Once they’ve had a consultation with you, your job is to find them a plot of land that’ll fit their needs.

Some islands are covered in snow or sand; surrounded by lush forests, waterfalls, and lakes; or are right in the middle of the ocean. There’s plenty of choice, offering countless opportunities to decorate lots of properties. After escorting the client to their new island, you’re free to start designing. Each villager has three particular items of furniture they would like for their homes. Outside of that, you can choose from a wide range of embellishments to use both inside and outside. It works the same way as when you decorate your own house. Apart from a couple of tweaks, it shouldn’t take too long before you get into the swing of things.

Plenty of creativity on offer

What is great about Happy Home Paradise is the amount of creativity on offer. You aren’t restricted in how you build the perfect holiday home. While you can’t alter the landscape, you’re free to add paths, flowers, and decorations anywhere outside the property, as well as how the house looks and the season. The best part of this is the mechanics are the same as when moving furniture or decorating inside. Planting, laying down paths or fences, and moving furniture is much easier because you do it with the click of a button and the move of the analogue sticks.

Decorating inside the house provides much more of an artistic license because you aren’t restricted to just choosing wallpaper, carpets, and furniture. You can change the size of the room; place partition walls to break up the living areas; add soundscapes that fit the needs of the client; and more. With the 2.0 update, you can also hang lights and other objects from the ceiling to really give them a personal edge. The more you customise the home, the more the client will show their love by a little heart appearing above them. As long as you are choosing items that match the theme, it’s difficult to mess up. One might require a movie star mansion, another might just want a peaceful zen-like property. Each animal has specific needs, and it’s up to you to take care of them.

Happy Home Paradise: Making memories

Once done, a photo of the property needs to be taken so it can be uploaded to the Happy Home Network. It’s a nice feature that allows you to keep track of all the homes you’ve decorated. What’s more, it can be accessed from your phone so you can always reminisce about your favourite builds. Happy Home Paradise essentially gives you an actual job in Animal Crossing New Horizons. With this job, you get paid in a new currency called Poki. Poki can only be spent on the new island, but there’s lots of new furniture you can buy. Like Nook’s Cranny, the stuff on offer changes daily. Once you’ve bought something, it can be taken back to your own island to either decorate your house or gift to your favourite villager.

The more you create, the Happy Home Planner’s island can be renovated, too. You’ll get to design a school, restaurant, hospital, and even a café can be opened. New abilities will become available, such as getting a lesson in polishing and cleaning the vacation homes. You can unlock the option to have two islanders live together, whether it be another person wanting a vacation home or through Amiibo scanning. I’ve had a great time building and decorating new homes. There’re a ton of options for making potential clients happy, even if decorating homes can become repetitive. Happy Home Paradise has given Animal Crossing New Horizons a much needed boost of content. Along with the 2.0 update, players have much more to do. Saying that, the DLC’s main focus is on creating living spaces, so if that’s not your bag, it’s probably best leaving it alone.