With the much-awaited successor to Animal Crossing: New Horizons expected to debut on the upcoming Nintendo Switch 2, fans have begun speculating about what new features, mechanics, and characters might define the series moving forward. Animal Crossing: New Horizons introduced an incredible level of customization, quality-of-life upgrades, and a broader range of villagers with different personality types—but there’s still room for Nintendo to experiment. Among the many Easter Eggs tucked into New Horizons, one small yet mysterious detail may point to a future possibility: aliens.
While Animal Crossing is largely a cozy simulation about home decor and community building, the series has always had room for the unexpected. Ghosts, dreamscapes, magic wands, time travel, and fortune-telling cats have made up the tapestry of the absurd in the franchise. Nintendo has deployed these elements sparingly to maintain balance, but fans have long embraced the series’ occasional ventures into the weird. And aliens might just be the weirdness to breathe back some life and bite into Animal Crossing.
Nintendo Could 'Steal' a Winning PlayStation Strategy For Its Next Animal Crossing Game
Nintendo should consider a page out of PlayStation's playbook for the next Animal Crossing: a fresh start without losing it all.
Aliens In Animal Crossing: New Horizons
Longtime fans will recognize the subtle strangeness of tuning in to a television at 3:33 AM on Saturday. For those who have never done it, the TV will display a grainy black-and-white transmission featuring an alien broadcasting an ominous message in an unrecognizable language. It’s a strange, singular moment in a game otherwise grounded in cutesy, slice-of-life charm. But perhaps, instead of this moment being an Animal Crossing Easter Egg, Nintendo could pull off the greatest surprise of all by making this a moment of foreshadowing.
In this context, alien villagers wouldn’t feel too out of place. On the contrary, they’d be a logical extension of the game’s more whimsical tendencies. If players can live alongside robotic frogs and an octopus Villager made out of takoyaki, a little extraterrestrial spice might actually feel right at home.
Aliens Could Expand the Lore—and the Gameplay
Adding aliens as a full-fledged villager type would allow Nintendo to tap into its creative potential. These villagers could bring entirely new dialogue, routines, and even gameplay interactions. Maybe their houses feature bizarre furniture you can’t get anywhere else unless you’re on good terms with them. Or, if they are just one more addition to the list of Animal Crossing NPCs, they could occasionally disappear to their “mothership” or leave crop circles in your farm plots.
From a design standpoint, alien villagers could push the envelope on the cutesy aesthetics of the franchise and animation. Nintendo could explore new body shapes, movement styles, or even reactive skin patterns. Their personalities might deviate from the existing villager archetypes to reflect unfamiliar worldviews, resulting in truly unique conversations.
A Fresh Personality Type For The Next Generation of Animal Crossing
Animal Crossing: New Horizons had eight villager personalities (four male, four female), but after hundreds of hours of gameplay, many players began to notice that interactions started to repeat. Introducing a completely new villager type would help freshen up these social dynamics. Alien villagers could be written to be deliberately confusing, overly curious, or endearingly awkward, giving the player new forms of social friction and charm to discover. Plus, from a storytelling perspective, their presence could deepen the mystery of the Animal Crossing world. Perhaps these aliens could know something that the player and other critters running about don’t know about their town/island.
It Could Be the Next Big Gimmick (In a Good Way)
Every Animal Crossing title has introduced a big new hook—whether it was city visits in City Folk, deep interior design in Happy Home Designer, or full-scale terraforming in New Horizons. For the next game to stand out, Nintendo will need something more than minor quality-of-life updates. Alien villagers, especially if paired with mysterious quests or unlockable mechanics, could provide just the kind of gimmick that helps define the next era of the franchise.
Players could enjoy earning alien friendship points by deciphering their strange language or completing cryptic tasks during rare celestial events. It’s the kind of long-tail content that encourages daily logins and rewards curiosity, a perfect fit for the franchise’s playstyle that would address Animal Crossing’s lack of friendship quests.
Nintendo Has Already Teased the Idea
Nintendo is known for laying the groundwork for future mechanics years in advance. The fortune-telling and dream-related Animal Crossing content from earlier games eventually evolved into major systems in New Leaf and New Horizons. With the alien TV broadcast already existing in New Horizons, it’s not a stretch to imagine this Easter egg evolving into something bigger. Whether it’s just a few alien NPCs or a whole new category of villagers, the concept is already seeded in the franchise’s DNA.
-
OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 90 /100 Critics Rec: 99%
- Released
- March 20, 2020
- ESRB
- Everyone / Comic Mischief, Mild Fantasy Violence, Users Interact, In-Game Purchases
- Developer(s)
- Nintendo EPD
- Publisher(s)
- Nintendo
- Engine
- Havok
- Multiplayer
- Online Multiplayer, Local Multiplayer
- Expansions
- Animal Crossing: New Horizons — Happy Home Paradise
WHERE TO PLAY
- Genre(s)
- Simulation
