Maze Island in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

One of the big new features in version 3.0 of Animal Crossing: New Horizons were the "Slumber Islands", where you can create up to three in three different sizes. They let you freely design without the limitations of your actual island, which is perfect to realize ideas that otherwise would have been too large or inconvenient. And one of the ideas I had was recreating an island from The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass.

Why, you ask...? Well, I generally enjoy recreating environments from other games, and the Nintendo DS Zelda games have a lot in common with how New Horizons structures its top-down world. The Switch title is actually much closer to them than it is to New Leaf or older Animal Crossing games. Plus, there is the whole islands-on-the-ocean setting, which the games have in common as well.

The most obvious candidate then was Maze Island, because it is square-shaped, much like all the islands in New Horizons, and it's entirely using only basic elements, where you can faithfully recreate the island in its entirety. New Horizons als has its own maze-like island for the May Day, so it's all connected and a good fit.

However, there was one problem: neither of the three given sizes were fully suitable. The small islands were too small. The big islands leave way too much space, where you would have to create a giant lake in the inside of the island, which is a bit weird.

This leaves the medium islands, but their inside has an actual square shape, as in quadratic, while Maze Island has the shape of a rectangle. It's about seven columns too short on the length, and also two rows too short on the depth, so I could not copy the maze 100% in its entirety.

Still, I went with a medium-sized island and just left the sides open, as a compromise. It's not like I was going to recreate the actual mini-game, so it's fine and I was even able to incorporate the beaches for a bit, making full use of the whole island.

Also, I had to improvise a bit to save two rows on the vertical axis, but I think I did a good job at hiding the omissions there. This is thanks to one major difference of how the Nintendo DS Zelda games and New Horizons behave:

In New Horizons you can move behind walls. In Phantom Hourglass it blocks you from doing so, where secretly all the walls are sloped on their backside to achieve this effect. This means that every horizontal wall in the maze takes up two rows and not just one. There is even a part at the center of the maze, which stacks up to three rows. So, the horizontal tunnels ended up being two blocks wide for the most part, but this happenstance let me omit two rows without it being noticeable.

As for the different elements inside the maze, I used the Goddess Statues to serve as the Gossip Stones. Having the actual Gossip Stone item back would have been awesome, of course, but this is a suitable replacement, where you can also interact with them. Otherwise, I used Plasma Balls to pose as Crystal Switches and I buried Dream Gold Nuggets wherever you would have encountered spike barriers. So, the maze is already in its cleared/solved state, where all the bridges got extended and all the spikes have been lowered. The game's own inclines were also too big, so I had to use ladders instead for all the locations that had one in the original.

You still have to put your house somewhere, but you can just place it on the beach, so it doesn't get in the way. I tried to give the rooms inside a slight Zelda theme without putting all that much effort into them, where the highlight is the Chris Houlihan Room:

Okay, to be honest, I stole the idea for this room from Nintendo, but I refined it a bit. And that's actually another great use case for Slumber Islands: making silly, pointless rooms, without feeling bad about the wasted space. This is simply meant to be art, where you can also tape a banana to a wall if it makes you happy.

Well, and that's it. That's Maze Island rebuilt in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. This project took me a whole Sunday and this was a lot of fun to do. I can't say that I will be making much use of this particular Slumber Island, but I will certainly keep and treasure it. Anyway, here is a gallery some more screenshots, where I compare them to the original from Phantom Hourglass: