A World In Your Pocket, ‘Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp’ Goes Mobile!

Laina Swatek ’20 / Emertainment Monthly Vice President and Executive Editor

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is now making it possible for Tom Nook to steal your real money! Well–not really.

This Nintendo mobile game, the newest installment in the Animal Crossing series, is a totally free, interactive village in your pocket with features never seen before. The franchise is well known for following the same basic gameplay from version to version, improved with a certain twist that makes each game unique in its own way.

In Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, your village is just a swipe away. It’s a mobile free-to-play real-life simulator, in which you build your own camp, chat up residents, and build new furniture and amenities to upgrade your site. You can also fish, catch bugs, gather fruit, and explore like games in the past, but there are also some new features to know about:

• Customization
  Your villager now lives in a camper! So feel free to customize it as much as you would like. As a player, you are able to spend time decorating, collecting rare furniture, and upgrading your living space.

• Amenities:
  These are the projects that’ll take a little more time and effort than your normal furniture crafting. Amenities are large-scale, interactive features for your camp, like merry-go-rounds, halfpipes, and more. Building amenities will bring more animal friends to you, and give them a place to have fun!

• Crafting furniture and friendships:
  To build new amenities in your campsite, you need to collect resources (like cotton and wood) from visiting animals. You must host the animals and help them out by gathering resources, doing favors, and creating a camp that is attractive to them, you earn friendship points! Once you’ve created a relationship, they’ll come back to visit your camp more and more, and reward you with resources. Then, use the catalog to craft whatever you wish!

• Leaf Tickets and Bells:
  If you’re looking to add an amenity to your camp, and stat, but don’t have the resources to craft it- then Tom Nook comes into play! He really likes to follow the money. Leaf Tickets allow you to build things in a snap, and you can achieve them through spending real cash or completing in-game objectives. On the other hand, you can continue to gather and earn Bells as standard in-game currency.

• Time and Travel:
  Unlike in past games, where season controls the variety of wildlife and the features in-town, it seems to have much less of an effect on Pocket Camp. However, real time applies as always. Visiting your camp at night will allow you to meet more nocturnal villagers, and you must also travel to different locations (like the beach, river, forest, island, etc) to find specific items not found in other areas.

While the game is currently unavailable worldwide, it’s available in Australia as testing ground for trial players. It’s already received glowing reviews from happy people, and is sure to be as enjoyed as its predecessors. The official release is expected for late November, with no official date yet given. When it does come out, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp will be available on Android and iOS phones, excluding older Apple devices.

So keep a look out for pitfall seeds when you run, beehives when you shake those trees, and Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp!