This is a 3DS game that came out a little while ago. I was interested in it and it was on sale this week so I went ahead and grabbed it.
HHD is not your typical Animal Crossing game. You do not have your own house, you can only really walk around the "city" part of your town because the villager houses are off in their own instances, you don't do any fishing or but catching or anything like that. Instead you work for Tom Nook and design homes for villagers and the town. That's basically it and so far I am finding it oddly compelling.
You start off just doing interiors for a few villagers. After a few of those you get to design the school, which means you can choose from several looks for the exterior as well as the interior. Then surprise! You can design the exterior for villagers! First there is a map of the entire village, with the town in the center. It's grid based so you select a spot on the grid and get to see what that part of the village looks like. Plenty of variety there like the shore, the forest, some mountain and cliff areas, etc. You also get to select which season you are designing in. Keep in mind, villagers each have their own "instance" of this plot of land. You could theoretically build everyones home on the same plot if you felt like it.
Once a plot is picked out you head over to the site and start designing. The villager will have some requirements for what must be there, and these are already in boxes for you to open. You are also given a whole bunch of other items to use that generally follow the same theme. You can use any of them or none of them if you want. As long as the required items are in place it doesn't really matter what else you do. I don't think the villagers care.
I guess this is both good and bad. The bad side is there is little mechanical challenge. You are not graded on how well you followed the villagers wishes, or if you followed the feng shui rules or whatever. But the positive side is you have almost total creative freedom to design whatever you like. When I got to design the cafe I could make it a sushi place, a coffee place, a fast food burger joint, or whatever I felt like.
So that's the basic loop of the game. You start the day by deciding what to design, a villager request or a town building. You will be given everything you need and then some to complete that task. All those items are added to your catalog so the next place you design you'll have even more options to choose from. Repeat until you tire of the loop.
One thing I hope finds its way into future AC games are the tools used to arrange furniture. This isn't like standard AC where you have to walk up to each thing and push it around one block at a time. You spawn the item from the catalog and then use the touchscreen to quickly move it around the room. Tapping on it will rotate it. If you hold it you can drag it to the toolbox on the side of the screen which will let you customize the item if that item is customizable. Customizing is pretty extensive letting you change the colors of pretty much all the furniture. Even something like the ramen bowl let me choose between 4-5 different kinds of ramen, haha.
Ok, this is getting kind of long. TLDR: It's a cool game IF you are in the mood for it. Designing interiors is surprisingly entertaining, very chill and relaxing. No time limits and the only person you need to impress is yourself. I get this great sense of satisfaction when I've spent some time and really customized a space the way I want. I will definitely keep playing and unlocking more and more stuff to choose from. That said, I can see why this got middle of the road reviews. It doesn't do anything wrong, but this is less of a "game" than even default Animal Crossing is. It's almost a software toy, like a digital dollhouse.
