The Creepiest Things We've Found In Animal Crossing
Animal Crossing has built its legacy by offering players a glimpse into the joys of moving to strange new towns full of strange new people, discovering hobbies, and working their way out of crushing debt. The number of adjectives gamers use to describe the Animal Crossing franchise is downright staggering but "relaxing," "charming," and "cute" usually top the list. However, after exploring the wide world of Animal Crossing for long enough, many players have added "creepy" to the long list of descriptors.
You have to really search for the creepy side of Animal Crossing, but rest assured: it's there, waiting to be discovered. Sometimes you have to comb through the furthest reaches of the games; in other instances, you stumble upon the franchise's darker side by accident. Occasionally, you encounter a friendly face who transforms into something terrifying if you think about it for too long.
Here are the creepiest discoveries players have made in the Animal Crossing series.
K.K. Slider sometimes sneaks in some creepy tunes
Animal Crossing is full of colorful characters, and few are as memorable as the game's resident musician, K.K. Slider. This guitar strumming canine appears in every game and produces some downright addictive songs, such as the soothing "Two Days Ago" and "Go K.K. Rider!" However, K.K. Slider has produced a variety of songs in different genres, including some that will chill you to the core.
One of K.K. Slider's creepiest creations is "K.K. Dirge" (a dirge is a song of lamentation for the dead). While the standard version is absolutely terrifying, the Air Check version is doubly so and sounds like it's voiced by restless ghosts. The song feels out of place in Animal Crossing and would better fit a Legend of Zelda dungeon full of Gidbos and ReDeads.
K.K. Slider's second creepiest song has to be "Hypno K.K." At first glance, the live version sounds hauntingly beautiful instead of just plain haunting. But, then you hear the Air Check rendition, which sounds like it's playing in reverse. Any song played backwards tends to make your hairs stand on end, even if it is penned by a cute Jack Russell.
Mr. Resetti's rants can break the fourth wall if you're not careful
While Animal Crossing tries to simulate real life, it cannot escape its video game nature. If something doesn't go your way, you can hit the reset button and try again. And that's where Mr. Resetti comes in, because his job is to remind you that you can't reset real life and shouldn't reset Animal Crossing either.
At first glance, Mr. Resetti is not creepy. He's just a mole with seven-on-the-Richter-scale mood swings who can rant for days about the importance of saving. Gamers have grown accustomed to his ramblings, but in the first Animal Crossing, Nintendo warned parents that his sudden appearances and demeanor might be "disturbing to young children." However, his creepiness burrows much deeper than scaring kids.
When you stop to think about Mr. Resetti, he's essentially a character who can see beyond the veil of time. He knows whenever you want a do-over (and if you cheated to get one). Most terrifying of all, if you press the reset button or forget to save too many times, Mr. Resetti pulls an Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem and fakes deleting your progress. He doesn't actually delete your save because he's a nice guy, but he scares the uninitiated nonetheless.
You can lose everything in a friend's town, including your face
If you play the original Animal Crossing and stick to your own town, you probably don't use the train often. You ride it into your village, pass by the station occasionally, and that's it. If you borrow a friend's GameCube save card, however, you can visit a town saved on their card. If all goes according to plan, you get to see some new sights, greet new neighbors, and maybe bag a souvenir. If not, then the creepiness starts.
If you reset the game while exploring your friend's town, you won't receive a visit from the ever-testy Mr. Resetti. Instead, your fate is far worse: you'll lose all of your money, items, and facial features. Your character's face will sport the blank, terrifying stare of Animal Crossing's famous gyroids. Some players have also reported the disappearance of one or more villagers after pulling off this trick.
While this "Easter egg" is creepy by itself, the rumored cause is far scarier. Many players believe the face is a failsafe that prevents a game-breaking bug that probably would force them to rebuild their town from scratch. To gamers, few things are more terrifying than losing all their progress to a save-eating glitch.
Wasps, tarantulas, and scorpions, oh my!
In the world of Animal Crossing, you are mostly free to complete activities at your leisure. You are in no rush to dig holes, plant trees, and decorate your house. However, all that changes when you run into (run from?) wasps, scorpions, and tarantulas.
While wasps ("bees" prior to New Horizons) aren't as scary as ghosts, anyone who has encountered these living attack drones will tell you that you do NOT want to get on their bad sides. You can easily avoid wasps in the real world, but in Animal Crossing, you never know until it's too late if a tree holds a nest. Once the wasp nest drops, you need to run for the nearest house to escape their stinging wrath.
Tarantulas and scorpions are slightly more tolerable since they are normally docile, but if they see you with a bug net, they will chase you with the vengeance of a thousand suns. While a tarantula, scorpion, or swarm of wasps only makes you pass out if they catch you (or in the wasps' case, give you a swollen eye and then make you pass out if they sting you again), the chase is enough to terrify most players.
Fan made towns bring the horror genre to life
Animal Crossing has always emphasized letting players create their own little worlds. Many build cozy hamlets, but more than a few have opted to build small nightmares. While the franchise doesn't offer as much open-ended freedom as titles like Dreams or LittleBigPlanet, many creepy little towns have popped up in Animal Crossing that use environmental storytelling to create Silent Hill-esque experiences.
Two of Animal Crossing's most famous user-made creepy towns are Aika Village and Hitokui from New Leaf. While Aika uses symbolism, scary music, and carefully placed objects to tell a horrifying story, Hitokui goes for full shock value with obvious gore that gives players Texas Chainsaw Massacre flashbacks. Admittedly, some of the creep factor is diminished by NPCs who only speak Japanese, but these towns still put the creative creepiness of players on full display.
Moreover, as technology improved, so did the tools players could use to customize their towns and villagers. Since players can now design more elaborate custom patterns, many have created blood splatters that bring the creepy villager (a.k.a. killager) meme to life.
The truth is out there (and on TV)
The passage of time is the lifeblood of the Animal Crossing franchise. In each game, characters have schedules, so you can't exactly talk to Tom Nook any time you want, even if you finally have the money you owe him. This system also ties into each game's events, including the terrifying ones that most will never see, because many people don't think to play Animal Crossing at three in the morning.
If you have the urge to power on your 3DS in the middle of the night and play Animal Crossing: New Leaf, you cannot interact with many of the game's NPCs. You can, however, turn on your in-game television and catch a UFO broadcast at 3:33 AM on a Sunday or Monday. The transmission consists of simple screens featuring a UFO and alien — the big-headed, bug-eyed kind — and its creep factor comes from its mystery. Who is broadcasting the footage? Why are they broadcasting the footage? Where are they broadcasting from? What is the significance of 3:33 AM? Players still don't know, which adds to the broadcast's terror.
Gyroids. Everything gyroids.
Gyroids are creepy by their very nature. While they look like terracotta cactuars, gyroids are actually based on haniwa figures that were buried with the dead in Japan during the Kofun period. This little factoid spawned the fan theory that Animal Crossing's gyroids are semi-sentient graves that house the souls of the departed, but some gyroids are even creepier than that theory.
Most gyroids are only disturbing when you stop to think about them, but a few drop all pretense and freak players out from the start. While many come in a variety of cute designs and make equally cute noises, tall buzzoids cry like haunted internet modems. Freakoids, meanwhile, scream like creepy, crying babies. And then there are howloids and poltergoids, which sound freaky and look even freakier because of their ghoulish faces.
Of course, gyroids have one more trick up their sleeves. They can appear anywhere. According to Dr. Shrunk in Animal Crossing: New Leaf, the gyroids in Club LOL just showed up "out of the blue" on the club's stage. At least they don't try to steal the spotlight from the club's performers.
The snowmen are alive, much to their despair
If you play Animal Crossing during the winter, you will probably want to build a snowman. Few players can resist participating in such an iconic wintertime activity. Moreover, snowmen spring to life once complete. While the surprise of a talking snowman is creepy on its own, the magic takes a turn for the bizarre if you mess up the snowman's body.
Most people know how to make a snowman. You roll balls of snow and pile them on top of one another, with the largest ball forming the base and the smallest forming the head. However, if you accidentally (or intentionally) screw up and place the larger ball on top, the snowman curses its existence with eloquence that belongs in a rendition of Frankenstein directed by William Shakespeare.
Okay, maybe their lamentations are kind of funny, but you cannot deny the inherent spook factor of snowmen gaining sentience at the drop of the hat.
Some characters are just plain haunting
Animal Crossing is full of wild and colorful characters, all of whom (with the exception of your avatar) are anthropomorphic animals. While this raises the obvious question of why the protagonist is the only human in the game, the more pressing question is why some characters go beyond simple anthropomorphism and cross into the realm of creepy.
Stitches, the patchwork teddy bear with cross marks where his eyes should be, is a prime example. Stitches' mere existence raises numerous questions since Animal Crossing features living bear neighbors. How does Stitches see? Is Stitches even alive? The same questions apply to Coco, who appears to be a gyroid crossed with a rabbit. Not only does Coco maintain a terrifyingly blank expression, but her creep factor is dialed up to eleven because her house looks like a funeral pyre and is filled with gyroids.
Coco and Stitches aren't Animal Crossing's only possible undead residents, though, as Lucky lurks throughout the franchise. His creep factor is dependent on whether you read his heavily bandaged body and single glowing eye as a sign that he is a mummy or recovering from a horrible injury.
Finally, there's Pietro, the sheep clown. However, you might only find him creepy if you suffer from coulrophobia.
New Horizons' fish are too realistic
Animal Crossing launched on the Nintendo GameCube (or the Nintendo 64 if you live in Japan). The franchise has seen entries on every Nintendo console since then, and while its art style has remained consistent throughout, graphical fidelity occasionally improved to take advantage of newer, stronger hardware. Though these improvements were baby steps in past iterations, Animal Crossing: New Horizons features the best graphics of the franchise ... which make its fish look absolutely terrifying.
Previously, fish in Animal Crossing were polygonal blobs that relied on textures to convey their fishy nature. In New Horizons, fish are hi-poly models that look far more realistic than previous incarnations, but not quite real enough. Many of the game's saltwater fish look so to true to life that they circle back to unappealing, if not downright creepy.
Prominent examples of fish that suffer from this effect are the ocean sunfish — whose bulging eyes stare into your soul — and the barreleye, which is already a creepy fish thanks to its translucent dome head and protruding, green eyes. Sometimes, there's such a thing as too much realism.
New Horizons' bug head models are full-on nope
Decking out your house in Animal Crossing is half the fun, especially since you can fill your home with tons of colorful furniture. Of course, you can also decorate your digital home with spooky doodads and New Horizons includes some of the most (unintentionally?) creepy decorations in an Animal Crossing game, if not any video game, period.
While wandering New Horizons, you might have encountered the Grasshopper-head, Mantis-head, and Wasp-head models. These horrific, blown-up renditions of bug heads are mounted on walls like hunting trophies and let you see every micron of their noggins in terrifying detail, from their chewing mandibles to their segmented antennae. Bug heads were not meant to be seen that close, but New Horizons provided the models, presenting them as art commissions by the special visitor, Flick. It's hard to decide what's more frightening: the models themselves, or the fact that one of your island's frequent guests creates them as a hobby.