User blog:Zarinaaa/Weird/Creepy Animal Crossing Towns Part 1: Aika Village

So I started playing Animal Crossing: New Leaf (several years late on that bandwagon, I know) because it's a good way to de-stress after work. For those unfamiliar, ACNL introduced a feature called the Dream Suite, which lets you visit dream villages that other users have put together using the 3DS's internet connection. Naturally, people started making strange and creepy things for other users to find, and I thought it'd be fun to explore some of them and make note of the good ones in some blogs in case other people want to give them a visit. Note that there are some towns that have information about them floating around on the internet, but they've been deleted following the "Welcome amiibo" update to ACNL. If you find a dream address that consists of only numbers and no letters, it probably won't work.

So with that out of the way, onto weird things people have done to cute video games.

Aika Village

Dream Address: 2D00-002A-49A0

Probably one of the best-known creepy towns. It's also been around for a long time; it existed before the "Welcome amiibo" update and had to be re-created after the fact. Aika Village has a lot of classic creepiness going on: creepy dolls, creepy little girls, an axe laying around with the implication that something terrible happened to the girl's parents which may or may not be due to the dolls...

The nice thing about this town is that it's pretty linear thanks to strategically-placed landmarks that kind of railroad you through the story it wants to tell. You start with a cute birthday party scene and travel through the increasingly dilapidated town to see the dolls slowly taking over. Every villager whose house you visit in this town will have a doll somewhere in there (not to mention the clown sheep who I hate because he's creepy enough on his own). Eventually you'll come to some graves, more dolls buried alongside them, and a pair of shoes on the beach which most people interpret as a symbol of suicide.

For those familiar with the horror tropes it employs, I don't think Aika Village will do anything really new or shocking, but it's well put-together, and it is possible to have an unsettling (and annoying) moment while trying to traverse a bookshelf maze in one house because the creepy little girl can spawn right in front of you when you enter it, forcing you to leave and come back before you can progress. I think it's worth checking out as the codifier of creepy Animal Crossing dream towns even if its tricks are a bit old hat to you.