It's been a minute since we highlighted a particularly impressive island from Animal Crossing. New Horizons, but we thought this one was worth it. We've seen many sublime efforts since the game launched back in March 2020, but the crossover appeal of mixing in another of video gaming's great isles really tickled our nostalgia bone.
This particular example incorporates elements of Myst, the genre-defining environmental puzzle/adventure game that took over the world back in the '90s.
Made by Claire Hummel, Lead Visual Designer at Cyan Worlds (the company that made Myst and Riven), and posted on Twitter recently, this New Horizons island features an abundance of details that will be familiar to anybody who has played the meditative, CD-ROM hit in the '90s and knows their way around the puzzling titular island.
Hummel goes on to mention the "obscene number" of custom design slots the ground textures take up. Having used dozens of ours to make little Star Trek costumes, we're somewhat familiar with the trial and error needed to produce intricate textures, and this is extremely impressive work! Not exactly surprising given that Hummel's credits include illustration and concept artwork on a whole bunch of great-looking projects, including Half-Life: Alyx, BioShock Infinite, and Campo Santo's ill-fated In the Valley of the Gods (which we still hope to see, one day — hey, Steam still has it listed for December 2029, so we haven't lost hope!).
Going into each detail of this ACNH Myst island would ruin the fun for anybody who hasn't played the game — and in 2024 we imagine there's a whole generation who might know of Myst but haven't experienced it — so we won't dig into specifics beyond showing what Hummel reveals in the follow-up tweet below. Suffice it to say that if you have played the game, catching all the references is a thrill:
In fact, writing this up has got us imagining a new entry in, say, Digital Eclipse's Gold Master Series, focusing on this monumental puzzler. It would be a fantastic fit for the interactive documentary series and would help contextualise for a modern audience what a mind-blowing experience it was to play Myst on PC or Mac in the mid-1990s.
Myst has appeared on Nintendo systems before, in rather poor ports for both DS and 3DS, and it's available on Switch in the form of realMyst: Masterpiece Edition. It feels like this classic is deserving of the Gold Master treatment, though, to make it really shine. For many of us, it's been a few years since we lost ourselves on a deserted island on Switch and we'd jump at the chance to revisit this particular one with extra trimmings.