I have spent my lockdown mining islands of tarantulas to pay for the construction of a Red Zen Bridge. It is lonely, terrifying work. When I’m not being bitten by wily spiders in the dead of night, I spend my days toiling in the fields: shaking trees, hitting rocks and fishing the seas clean. When I can afford the airfare, I travel to yet more islands and harvest them clean of every resource, filling my pockets until I can fill them no more.

There is nothing but toil. I, the lone human, live amongst a community of gauche animals, who wander aimlessly around their island prison while I amass improbable riches in an attempt to pay off even more improbable debts. Such is life in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a haunting morality play masquerading as cutesy world-building sim.

Nintendo’s outrageously popular sim has been adopted as the lockdown entertainment method du jour. And why not! You’re trapped at home, so why not fill your days frolicking in paradise. Except this isn’t paradise. This is late stage capitalism with talking squirrels. The key flaw in Animal Crossing: New Horizons is also its greatest strength: once you’ve attracted a singing dog to your island, the game is effectively complete. You are free. But freedom is an illusion. Under the control of Tom Nook, the game’s benevolent tanuki overlord, you are put to work in the endless pursuit of what you assume must be some higher purpose.

Failure to comply has consequences. On April 22, the game’s central bank acted swiftly to crush a growing insubordination. “We are writing to inform you that we have reduced the interest rate offered to all savings accounts,” read a letter issued by the Bank of Nook. As a salve, the bank also sent a gift: the almost perfectly named Bell Bag rug. The rate cut was seemingly introduced to stop people using a time travel “hack” that allowed them to amass huge fortunes by fiddling the game’s clock, thus allowing them to break free of Nook’s debt-laden drudgery by maxing out interest payments on their savings.

Nook’s robber baron tendencies are a long-running joke in Animal Crossing, but the game’s latest instalment is unquestionably the most complete realisation of his dystopia. You are placed on a deserted tropical island. Your mission? To harvest its resources and bring some order and civilisation to the wilderness. A little more than a month after its release, we are now seeing the fruits of such labour: fantastically elaborate islands built on the belief that the natural world is there for us to exploit so that we might, somehow, advance as a civilisation. It’s basically Easter Island, but with a really great clothes shop run by two utterly delightful blue hedgehogs.

Ask Nook what you should do and he will shrug: do what you love, he will chirrup. But you both know full well the contract you have signed. In exchange for the illusion of freedom, you must work until you can work no more. Until every single pixel of paradise has achieved its maximum potential. You could, of course, live in a modest home and fill your days living off the land. Or you could harvest your island beyond all recognition like the crazed capitalist pig you are. And, of course, make some impressive custom paving.

The most intriguing aspect of Animal Crossing, and arguably what makes it such a successful game, is that it presents a version of capitalism devoid of consequences. You can bury yourself in debt and never pay back a penny. The sun still rises in the morning and sets at night, the butterflies still dance around your immaculate rose garden. In real life, you’d be driven out of your home, your life in tatters.

Not so in Animal Crossing. Sure, you’re up to your eyeballs in debt and you’re instead spending huge sums on a tropical garden adventure playground. So what? The debt will get paid back another day. Or not. Nook doesn’t care. But you do. And this is where the game’s design is so ingenious: the debt is what gives you purpose. Fail to pay back debts and the game fails to progress. And if the game fails to progress, your civilisation fails to progress. Failure to progress is failure to find purpose. Sure, you won’t die. But you might as well be dead. With your debts paid off and your island home resplendent, you idly head online and start looking at other people’s islands. And you panic. How is their tropical garden adventure playground so much more impressive than yours? Why, suddenly, does your terraforming look more slapdash than inspired? Again, Nook doesn’t care – but you do. And so you take on more debt and you toil.

Which brings us back to the Bank of Nook’s interest rate cut. If the ultimate currency in Animal Crossing is toil, then get-rich-quick scams are the ultimate betrayal of its capitalist idyl. The idea that debt gives you purpose underpins everything in Animal Crossing. This is especially evident if you try to add an extension to your house. Each extension is astronomically more expensive than the one that preceded it, hooking you into a frankly laughable cycle of toil as you turn your island into a pastoral Pez dispenser in an attempt to make as much money as possible as quickly as possible. All the while, Nook applauds your commitment to the island cause. The idea here is simple: if you toil hard enough for long enough, you will be rewarded.

The reward isn’t belonging – after all, why do you work so hard when the elephant next door just trots around looking for bugs all day? Nor is the reward family – the elephant likes you, but no amount of small talk is going to uncork some x-rated interspecies romance. The reward is capital. A bigger house. An island that gleams and glistens with the spoils of your labour. Since its launch in 2001, the Animal Crossing series has given people access to something that increasingly eludes us in the real world: a place to call home. The only price? Your freedom.

James Temperton is WIRED's digital editor. He tweets from @jtemperton

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This article was originally published by WIRED UK