Eighteen years ago, when I first played the video game Animal Crossing, I had few responsibilities and an excess of leisure time. Like many young people, I believed that this arrangement would be permanent. I spent hours cross-legged on the floor, roaming the pastoral town in which my character hoped to build a new life. My own life was characterized by idleness, but in the game I was heroically industrious, inspired by the security of routine. I fished and foraged, or befriended my neighbor, or decorated my home. The adult world that I was entering seemed overwhelmingly complex. Here, onscreen, was a vision of life that could be ordered, understood, and—so long as I paid off my virtual mortgage—perhaps even won.

My girlfriend was not a keen player of video games, but even she found refuge in the world’s gentle rhythms. We often sent each other gifts and notes using the game’s postal service—trinkets of affection that somehow had as much meaning as a necklace or a bottle of aftershave. We were enjoying, I now realize, precisely the sense of connection that Animal Crossing’s designer, Katsuya Eguchi, wanted to create. Eguchi joined Nintendo, in 1986, at the age of twenty-one and found himself alone, in a new city, severed from friends and family. Even as he climbed the company ladder, he routinely had to work past his children’s bedtime. Animal Crossing was his response: a game in which people, playing at different times, could bond in unprecedented ways. Eguchi could finally spend time with his children.

The latest entry in the series, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, was released on Friday. In a strange turn, a franchise born from solitude and estrangement now finds itself in a world of quarantine, and for many players New Horizons will offer a sublime escape. Having started a new life on a desert island, they can enjoy the experience of visiting neighbors’ houses, browsing fully stocked shop shelves, and hopping on a plane to visit a friend. They can interact with anybody, anytime, without fear of infection. As Aya Kyogoku, the series’s current director, told me, “the game can provide those practicing social isolation with a place that can relieve them of anxiety and stress.”

Of course, in a medium dominated by shooters and war games, Animal Crossing always seemed to present a kinder, more subtle mode of play. One of the game’s cardinal virtues is that it happens in real time. The sun rises and sets in accordance with our own, and the seasons move in step with the calendar. Ice thaws to make way for the first buds of spring. In autumn, tree leaves bronze and fall. Winter rains fill the streams with migrant species of fish, which can be caught and sold or donated to the local museum. Each new day brings a fresh eruption of life and potential.

The result, all the more likely if you’re trapped at home, is that the game becomes a fixture in your daily routine. Each morning, you might tour the island, dig up the handful of fossils that have surfaced overnight, pluck some fruit to sell at market, browse items in the village shop, and check in with your neighbors. The game’s overarching objectives—weeding, bridge-building, the organization of a pop concert—aren’t urgent, and wasps that chase you are the only villains. The game’s demands are rarely overwhelming. It’s merely life, lived somewhere else.

Like life, New Horizons has some familiar figures—namely Tom Nook, a local businessman who has appeared in every Animal Crossing game. Nook (whose name is a pun on the Japanese word for his species, Tanuki, or raccoon dog) funds your relocation to the island, and the construction of your home, via loans that must be repaid by carrying out errands or selling the resources that you have caught or foraged. He encourages you to borrow ever greater sums, in order to pay for ever larger properties furnished with an ever wider variety of belongings, which are sold exclusively through the shop that he owns. (Your interior décor is regularly appraised by a panel of unseen judges, who issue a score that is delivered via letter.) Although the rest of the game represents a return to a simpler, bucolic way of life, Nook will seem less alien to a contemporary audience. His argument, implicit throughout, is that wealth is necessary, not just for material comfort but for a reputable standing in the community.

It is possible, in New Horizons, to slip the game’s industrialist framework and eke out an alternative, hunter-gatherer life style, with only the tent with which you begin. But the game is designed to incentivize working with Nook. He asks you to pick out the plot for the village shop and museum; he asks for suggestions about where to place the houses that his company will build for newcomers. “Together we’re reshaping this barren wastela—I mean, pristine paradise—into a lovely community,” he says, early into your partnership. The line could have been plucked from a debate about gentrification, but Nook’s creators insist that he’s more than a craven developer. “It may seem like Nook is an evil guy who takes all your money, but I want you to know that he is a real nice guy,” the producer Hisashi Nogami told me.

New Horizons subscribes to a specific, materialist vision of society, but it also offers the opportunity to transcend that vision and to find purpose in mundane acts of kindness and reciprocity. In wheedling its way into a player’s routine, the Animal Crossing series anticipated a quality that is now common in video games, whose designers use hooks and incentives—the promise of virtual costumes or currency, say—to make their work a daily appointment. But where most games seek to exploit those hooks in order to turn a diversion into an obsession, Animal Crossing pursues a more nourishing model. Its goal is not to steal us away from life but to attune us to its pleasures. If left untended, your village becomes overrun with weeds. When you return to the game, a neighbor may remind you, pointedly, about how long it has been since your last visit. You may even discover letters in your in-box that remind you of a lapsed friendship or a departed love. Just as the game provided a reassuring rhythm two decades ago, in my journey from adolescence to adulthood, so it can remind us of the value of connection—and retreat—in the midst of a pandemic.