Ignoring the low murmur of multiple petitions by the newly homebound to release early, Nintendo – on March 20, 2020 – dropped the newest highly anticipated chapter in the Animal Crossing series into a very different and rapidly changing world. At that time, it was still a world in which you could buy a Switch console for list price. And many, many people did.

With the help of Discord, I met my nephew-in-law for the first time on Animal Crossing: New Horizons (ACNH) a few days later–really met him. In real life, of course, I’ve been to countless dinners, lunches, and even a wedding with the tween nephew of my spouse over the last year. But I hadn’t had an actual conversation with him until we were both stranded in different houses with his school closed indefinitely and my work hours dwindling uncomfortably. He’s normally a tough nut to crack, content to go it alone with this phone at any given social gathering.

In ACNH, however, he shines. He has the outfits, the clever title visible when he flies into my island’s airport (the means by which “multiplayer” happens), he knows all the game’s mechanics, he’s researched the elusive golden tools, and he’ll tell you about the time he found an island shaped like a star and full of bells (one of ACNH‘s currencies).

He is talking to me, not a nod and a grunt but complete sentences! Just as I start to mentally sag, realizing all we are talking about is the game (but I’ll take it!), real-life concerns and anecdotes start to wend their way into our talks. School is sending work home, he is bored, this is what he ate for dinner.

The strange phenomenon of an adult person suddenly having an entire game world in common with a kid is intriguing to me. I start pressing the boundaries by poking at our collective world, throwing out the softball, “They could really use a quality-of-life pass on this game.”

Anyone who plays ACNH for any length of time starts to resent the very long, very unnecessary, and very unskippable dialogues required to perform simple repetitive actions.

“Have you noticed there are exactly zero player settable options? At least text speed and control over the music would be welcome,” I continue. He absolutely floors me by pointing out that the whole Animal Crossing series evolved at a time when the processing power of handhelds was nothing to write home about, and everything had to be stuffed onto a single cartridge that could never be updated. Comparatively, the New Horizons chapter of the game really hasn’t broken much new ground, mechanics-wise.

He sums it up by opining the annoying inability to craft multiple items at once and specify quantities when buying anything (besides turnips) is because it has always been that way and no one took the effort to change the code. There is no way I’m going to point out that previous games didn’t really have crafting. We are having a conversation!

Also, he’s right. It feels very much like no one took the effort to fix what has long been broken with the franchise. The Pokémon games suffered from the same indignity until the recent Sword and Shield release finally tore down that wall. I suspect the devs of both franchises feel the very real need to walk that thin line between not diluting the best-selling magic formula they’ve stumbled upon and modernizing.

Then he does it again: “And what’s up with Tom Nook? He’s so creepy.” I agree. We both feel it. There is something slightly off about ACNH, and I’m not only talking the eternally creepy Tom Nook. I know he doesn’t charge interest on those loans or the island infrastructure, but he’s getting something out of all those bells that pass through his paws. He’s getting paid somehow.

I am haunted by the maxim that if the source of profit for any given product or service is not immediately identifiable, then you are the product. I casually ask my nephew-in-law if he’s seen the ghost at night on his island, because I think Tom Nook may be paid in souls. We laugh it off… but still.

Think about it. It costs 1.2 million bells to add a second floor to your little house. That hurts. Right in the soul. And Tom Nook is there to vacuum it all in to preserve his youth so he can be in the next title. Don’t even get me started on Isabelle’s morning drinking—a topic I avoid with my nephew.

It’s not just me! Tom Nook is a little bit creepy. What’s his endgame?

The creep factor of ACNH isn’t exactly DEFCON 1, but there is this low-pressure eerie front that sweeps in from the ocean to permeate a world in which your character is the only human being and everyone else is an anthropomorphized animal that speaks some babble language you need subtitles to understand.

As friendly and reverent as the islanders are to you, you are always the outsider. Since multiplayer mandates certain limits on what tasks you can do while other humans visit your island – and the cooperative features are weak to say the least – interaction with human characters is limited to these transient I sell/you sell/oh I like your house blips.

If someone tells you that the multiplayer in ACNH is so amazing they had their corporate board meeting in the game, they are really saying they had an audio meeting in Skype or Teams or Slack while up to 8 of their characters sat mostly stationary after looking around someone’s island and, maybe, asking how you grew those black tulips.

In other words, they had a conference call.

They could have all left their Switches powered off, sent a screenshot of their characters to one another, and had a very similar experience. Since the Switch has no native voice chat to speak of, another service commonly ends up doing the heavy lifting in any ACNH online play. This isn’t particular to ACNH, of course; it’s an oft-maligned oversight of the platform itself.

Cult or legit business meeting? You decide.

Ultimately, my nephew and I do what we came together to do: trade fruit native to each other’s island and then part ways. We stand about 6 in-game feet from each other. He drops his apples on the ground, and I drop my oranges. A true COVID-19 transaction since it is impossible to hand each other items.

Now we can establish orchards of fruit that sell for 500 bells apiece instead of 100. Now we can plant trees worth 1,500 per harvest instead of 300. We have become ACNH gods. He leaves, content that he has a new citrusy tool in his neverending effort to pay off Tom Nook.

But more important, I end the Discord chat content that I have a new tool in my neverending effort to understand and interact with my nephew.