Animal Crossing: New Horizons video shows weird and wonderful ways to decorate your island

(Image credit: Nintendo)

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the first game in the series to let you fully decorate beyond the confines of your home, and this new video shows off some of the possibilities.

Want to cozy up your camp area with some tables and a barrel fire? Go for it. Want to go a step further and set up some entertainment for your visitors with instruments and comfy seating? You're in business. Want to turn the outdoors into a classroom for your visitors and animal neighbors? OK, sure, as long as you don't mind all your textbooks getting wet when it rains.

Interior decoration has always been a big part of the Animal Crossing series, and while you've been able to put your mark on the rest of your town with flowers, designs, or public works projects, you've never been able to just drop furniture outside of your house. Technically you could drop it out there, but it would only ever appear as a little green leaf. Don't ask me how the physics work with that, or how your character can fit 10 apples, a red snapper, and an axe in their pockets.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons breaks down that inside/outside distinction: you can put your furniture pretty much anywhere that you can reach. I can only imagine the beautiful arrangements people will think up, along with the bizarre dungeons they will construct around their least favorite neighbors' homes.

It doesn't stop at furniture, either. As we learned in the Animal Crossing: New Horizons Direct presentation, you can even reshape the geography of your island itself with special tools for landscaping and "cliffscaping". Am I going to abuse those privileges to choke my island's infrastructure with an irresponsible number of picturesque waterfalls? I'm not not going to do that.

Check out four ways to play the same day in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Connor Sheridan

I got a BA in journalism from Central Michigan University - though the best education I received there was from CM Life, its student-run newspaper. Long before that, I started pursuing my degree in video games by bugging my older brother to let me play Zelda on the Super Nintendo. I've previously been a news intern for GameSpot, a news writer for CVG, and now I'm a staff writer here at GamesRadar.