Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer

Happy Home Designer turns the established Animal Crossing formula on its head: instead of fixing up their own house and paying off a mortgage to Tom Nook, the player takes on the role of an interior designer who furnishes houses, offices and public buildings on commission for the village's animal residents. The basics stay the same – placing furniture, choosing wallpaper and flooring, working on the garden exterior – but the classic free-form progression, debts, and gathering materials through fishing and bug-catching that otherwise define the series are missing.

The game was released in September 2015 for the Nintendo 3DS as a standalone spin-off rather than a typical entry in the main series, and it used special Happy Home Designer amiibo cards as well as regular amiibo figures and cards from the series to quickly summon specific animal characters and their custom commissions. A card featuring a given character also let the player, once the amiibo phone was unlocked, contact that character again at any time and redesign their home according to new wishes, or even place them into public buildings like the school or hospital. Compared to the classic entries, this is a notably more free-form, creativity-focused game with no goal of fixing up one's own dwelling, paying off debts, or tracking the seasons – the focus lies purely on designing spaces for others, which makes it more of a creative tool and furniture catalog than a simulation of everyday rural life as players know it from the main series.

Why play it: Happy Home Designer will mainly appeal to those who enjoyed Animal Crossing chiefly for furnishing interiors and experimenting with decorations – it frees them from side obligations like paying off debts or gathering materials and lets them spend their time purely on designing homes for their neighbors.