For fans ofAnimal Crossing, the idea of turning a ramshackle island paradise full of animal friends into a tropical tourist trap may sound familiar. The developers ofCritter Covemay have a similar concept to the2020 hitAnimal Crossing:New Horizons, but the execution of the idea has loftier ambitions.
At its core,Critter Coveis about revitalizing a small run-down town into a tourist paradise by farming, decorating, exploring, recruiting residents, and expanding a city players create to help an anthropomorphic businessman attain his capitalistic dreams. But the world players find themselves in has more in common withopen-world crafting sandbox games likeAloftthan it may sound, leading players to be regularly surprised by the scale Gentleman Rat Studios manages to reach with the studio’s cozy opus.
In a recent interview with Game Rant, the three-person team responsible for the game explained that its various systems exist to encourage exploration and to teach players more about a post-apocalyptic world, where the titular town of Critter Cove is rising from the ashes to become a place people want to be. This decision to focus on exploration has given the game a different direction to the obvious point of comparison,Animal Crossing: New Horizons,although art director Christine Chugon didn’t shy away from drawing connections. That said, it was an olderAnimal Crossinggamethat inspired some of her favorite game decisions.
My very firstAnimal Crossinggame wasWild Worldon the DS, and I loved it. I had Chow the panda bear, and he was just mean. The more you talk to him, the more you get to know each other, he gets nicer with you, but I mean, not nice…in a nice sense. The newerAnimal Crossings, as I play on more and more, it’s like everyone’s starting to feel a little samey. Everybody’s just really nice and everyone’s really happy to be here. Even if they’re sad or angry, they’re still positive.
While designing characters, Chugon went back to the older style of sassy and grumpy townsfolk. One character, Pokee, is a bearded dragon from the starting area called Happy Harbor and is a personal favorite character for Chugon due to her truly sassy nature. Renard, the rat whose financial ambitions act as the game’s inciting incident, is deeper than simply aTom Nookanalogue. He’s a bit shadier and his business isn’t always on the up-and-up. He’s not a dark character, but he is more complex and nuanced.
That additional texture applies to other systems in the game as well. Farming, for instance, is a staple of cozy games, and the system is central to theCritter Coveexperience.Critter Covebegan as amagic-focused fantasy farming sim similar toFloraMancernamedSeeds of Magic. That DNA is still found in the final product, with the farming system making its debut in the closed beta playtest the game will offer players in March. The system also allows for farming of ocean flora in floating containers players can use to develop an ocean park.
Critter Covealso adds depth to its crafting mechanics through a recipe generation system that lead programmer Jason Holding is particularly proud of. In addition to finding crafting recipes out in the world through pictographs or items from treasure, players can learn to build things to decorate their settlement by encountering them in the ruins of the old world. In this way, too, the desire to decorate feeds back into the game’s goal of encouraging players to explore.
One of the key features—and I just love this feature, I think it’s a unique feature—is that to make anything, you have to go around and deconstruct things. Let’s say, you have to go find lampposts, and you have to break them down with your wrench. You learn each time you break one. Maybe after 10 of these, you know how to create a lamppost, but you had to go find those broken lampposts in the first place.
Then, there’s the exploration itself. One of the earliest things designed forCritter Covewas its water physics. Players can swim and dive but also canset sail to reach farther and farther islandsin the archipelagic game world. Starting with a dinghy and reaching for a ramshackle ship, players will have the ability to take to the seas in an organic and rewarding way. And while to date the game’s featured fairly normal island biomes, more fantastical lands to explore are on the horizon with the introduction of a giant mushroom fantasy biome coming in Early Access.
This exploration is the thing developers were most excited to see players embrace, but it functions as part of the tourism-focused gameplay loop. The town will feature everything from shops and restaurants to attractions and even clinics, and these can range from the ordinary (the kind of coin-operated children’s rides seen commonly outside storefronts) to the imaginative (a catapult that will fling a tourist into the ocean, for them to swim back to shore).
By focusing on multiple systems to help develop the island,Critter Covetries to keep its gameplay loop fresh, but it also manages this by increasing demands posed by greater tourism ratings. It isn’t just aboutdecorating an island paradise, however. Lead designer and Jason’s brother, Eli Holding, explained the in-depth system behind tourism and how it encourages players to explore the world, which inadvertently bears some resemblance to real-world revitalization efforts used by resort towns.
The more you build up your town, the more people want to visit your town. They’ll arrive, and it’ll initially only be a handful of people who show up to check out your town. If there are not a lot of things for the people to do, your rating won’t be very high…You want to balance between the number of things you have going on in town versus the number of tourists that are willing to come to town. The whole thing is kind of a loop: you have to build your shops, you have to build your decorations, and then the people will come. The reason why you want more people to come is so you make more money, so you can buy more shops and more decorations.
When players feel they’ve got enough going on in their town to entertain more visitors, they can increase their town’s travel rating, but if they do that too early and can’t entertain the new guests, they’ll run the risk of sending tourists home disappointed and ultimately not getting as much money to reinvest in the town. Itfunctions as the economic enginethat keeps the game, and the cove within it, flowing.
