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It's been six weeks since Nintendo launched Animal Crossing smartphone spin-off Pocket Camp worldwide and I wrote about everything the game lacked. It felt like there was something missing from Pocket Camp - a feeling the app had failed to replicate what had made Animal Crossing so good on GameCube, Wii and 3DS before. Pocket Camp at launch was a disappointingly barebones experience - I described it as "stripped back" - and unrewarding in how it provided a seemingly meaningless parade of rewards in place of the meaningful connections I had made with Animal Crossing townsfolk in the past. To a greater extent, I still think all of that is true - I'm not still logging in everyday to see how Jay or Kid Cat are doing or which of the limited things in the app they're up to. Is Alfonso sitting on the sofa again? No. But I am still logging in every day. After finishing our review I was more than ready to move Pocket Camp into a folder alongside Miitomo and never boot it up again. And then Nintendo launched the app's Christmas update, and a friend event, and then a whole other set of gameplay and rewards for a garden? And I realised Nintendo wasn't treating this like any other Nintendo game I'd played before. I was playing an early access Nintendo game and watching it evolve in front of me.
Nintendo has embraced a delayed roll-out of game content before, but what makes Pocket Camp different to something like Arms or Splatoon is the way it has branched out with new gameplay entirely. Both Arms and Splatoon doled out a bit more of what they had already - levels, characters - but largely kept within their pre-defined boundaries. Pocket Camp's gardening gameplay is something different. It's actually pretty intricate in how it asks you to plant and harvest seeds, cross-pollinate them to create rarer varieties and care for the flowers of your friends by travelling to their towns, watering can in hand.
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