Since Animal Crossing: New Horizons launched five years ago (!!), it has sold over 48 million copies, launched its own DLC, cropped up in Smash Ultimate, landed a PS5 versio- Wait a second, that last one isn’t right.
If you happen to be scrolling the PlayStation Store of late, you might notice a particularly familiar-looking art style in the shape of developer Wisnu Sudirman’s ‘Anime Village Online’. Contrary to its appearance, this is not an Animal Crossing game. That’s right, we have another rip-off on our hands (thanks for the heads up, VGC).
Set to be released in 2027 (though we wouldn’t bet on it making it that far), Anime Village Online promises to be a “cozy life simulation game where you can create your dream village, decorate your home, and enjoy a peaceful world — all while playing solo or with friends online”. It boasts such original features as the chance to “Design and expand your own charming house”, “meet NPC villagers”, and “Invite friends to visit your village”. Is this ringing any bells?
Of course, a lot of those features can be mapped to just about every cosy game we can think of — and not everything is an Animal Crossing rip-off — but there’s something about that key art which just looks very ninja-worthy. As YellowFlower69 said as they shared the game page to the r/playstation Reddit forum, “someone is getting sued”.
No screenshots have been added to the PlayStation Store game page just yet, but based on that description and key art, we imagine that they’d probably have more than a little AC flavouring.
This isn’t the first time that we’ve seen something distinctly New Horizons-y appear on the PlayStation Store, either. Earlier this year, the similarly titled ‘Anime Life Sim’ caught our eye with its all-round Animal Crossing vibe. That project ended up being a straight asset flip of the ‘CozyLife: Social Sim Game’ Unreal Engine template and, unsurprisingly, has since been taken down.
We don’t know for sure whether Anime Village Online will meet the same fate (it probably will), but just make sure you aren’t fooled by another one of Redd’s fakes.
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