Animal Crossing: New Horizons is back with new content. Along with the big update to the base game came a new DLC: Happy Home Paradise. I decided I wanted to give it a try and here is what I think.
This post contains affiliate links. Any purchases made will give me a small commission.
In Happy Home Paradise, you are tasked with working as a vacation home designer for various villagers. You’ll do everything from choosing where their home will go, the exterior of it including the yard, and the design of the interior to fit the villager’s request. You will also have opportunities to design different businesses on the base island for the agency as well as visit previous homes you’ve designed and spruce them up as you unlock more skills.
When designing a home, you are given items to use from your client’s wishlist to start with followed by a large inventory that includes a recommended section. It doesn’t have every item in the game in it, but it provides plenty of options to get your creative juices flowing and designing. And as you progress, you gain skills like polishing to make the furniture shine, partitions to separate a room as you wish, and more. And you get to take these skills back to your island later!
I have enjoyed playing the DLC as an added activity alongside the latest updates. When I’m in a designing mood I can go and work on vacation homes, doing designs I wouldn’t do in my own home but find interesting. You do get to choose which villagers you design homes for, and you get a preview of what they are thinking so you can decide if you want to help them. So whether you want a bungalow of baskets or a home fit for a king and his porcelain thrones, you can choose.
Some other things you get from the DLC are unique items in a shop within the agency that requires a unique currency, Poki, to obtain. you earn Poki by making the vacation homes so don’t worry about that. And the more you work the more money you make, so the more you can buy.
Once you “beat” the DLC objectives, you’ll get to design the interiors of your island’s homes, which I am looking forward to. I’ve had some residents with questionable decor that I would love to redo so I’ll be striving to get the thirty vacation homes needed to earn that.
Overall, I’m really glad I got the DLC. It adds even more things to do in the game with a worthwhile progression of rewards that you can carry into your base game. It’s more interesting than scouring random islands for resources endlessly and hoping to get the recipes you want to make cool stuff. It’s a good extension to the game, as a DLC should be.
Have you jumped back into Animal Crossing once these updates hit? Tell me what you think of the additions in a comment!
It looks like a pretty good DLC pack, but I don’t think it’s enough to draw me back to the game. I am glad to hear it’s indeed good, though.
I haven’t downloaded this yet, but now that I know I’ll be able to redesign the interiors of my islander animal’s homes, I’m going to have to get it. Some of those animals are in serious need of decorating assistance 😉