The LEGO Animal Crossing sets released in March 2024 feature a range of different minifigures and island elements bringing back memories of 2020’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons in the form of everyone’s favourite plastic bricks.
As we run through each of the sets to see which one is best, here we’re looking at Isabelle’s House Visit — a particularly interesting example as it’s the only one to contain the series’ inimitable mayoral assistance and admin extraordinaire, the loyal and lovely Isabelle.
Let’s crack open the box and see if we’ll be inviting Isabelle in for tea and a chat, or closing the curtains and hoping she doesn’t come around to the back to check whether we’re in.
What’s in the box?
Opening up the box, you’ll find six bags (the standard plastic variety rather than the new paper ones found in the Bunnie’s Outdoor Activities set), a loose base plate, and the instruction booklet.
Cracking into bag one, building the adorable Isabelle is your first job, after which she gives you a wave in the manual and can be seen strolling along the bottom of the pages, working her way to the finish line as you go.
Isabelle’s House Visit build
First up, the Isabelle minifigure is everything you want it to be. With a little navy shirt over her short legs — which are bendable, just like standard legs rather than the static shortened variety — this minifig is one of the most adorable Lego has ever produced. To say it was the main reason we were excited about this kit would be an understatement — no offence to Fauna, but if Isabelle weren’t visiting her house, our interest would have taken a huge dive.
As you begin building, you’ll keep coming across tiny elements and details you recognise: a pumpkin, a little 1×2 tile recipe card, a phone with the apps from the game displayed, with all details printed, no stickers whatsoever. It’s these tiny details which give the Animal Crossing flavour, of course, and each one brings a smile to your face.
Bag one contains Isabelle, a small vegetable patch, and a crafting bench. The carrot stalks feel overly long for the carrot, otherwise it’s a solid start.
Fauna and her house arrive in bags two through five. After the smaller terrain modules in the other sets (Nook’s Cranny notwithstanding), it’s nice to get some extended building time. There’s nothing particularly complicated, although young children will likely need a hand with some of the more fiddly bits — there are a lot of small pieces here.
The house comes with two sets of windows — a brown square pair or a blue rounded pair — and it’s up to you which you go with. Personally, we like the rounded detailing and the splash of colour the blue ones bring. The flat brown plates that make up the detailing on the gable look blocky and simplistic juxtaposed with the curves of the roofing behind — we would have liked to see something more intricate there given that the gable is such a prominent part of an otherwise impressively detailed little abode.
Towards the end, you build a selection of domestic items with some neat details — the patchwork quilt on Fauna’s bed is particularly nice touch — and the manual offers some suggestions on how to arrange them. If we’re being super picky, it would have been nice to have an integrated space to store the spare windows somewhere in or around the house, but given the small scale of the set, there’s some really great attention to detail here.
The last bag contains the apple tree and the floating balloon present to be shot down for goodies.
Overall, the set takes 45 minutes to an hour to build, although we were stopping often to snap pictures and make notes. You might be able to trim 10 minutes off that, although with all the tiny pieces it might take you a bit longer if you’re building with kids. You don’t get a separator in this set, either, so you might want to dig one of those out to correct mistakes.
One other thing worth mentioning is that you end up with a large pile of extra pieces. We’re not sure if Lego’s policy on providing extra parts of the tiniest elements has become more generous over time, but there do seem to be way more pieces left over than there used to be. Don’t get us wrong — it’s good, especially as these little pieces are liable to disappear between floorboards and inside furniture over time, and it’s easy enough to personalise the set with some extra details — the party hats are great.
It is obviously not the case that the plastic from all of these surplus bricks could have been put towards, say, another minifigure, but with so many pieces going into our personal pick ‘n’ mix pot, we wonder if it’s not overkill? Not a problem, just something we noted.
Isabelle’s House Visit cost
Isabelle’s House Visit retails for $39.99 / £34.99 / €39.99.
For that, you get 389 pieces, with the cost-to-piece ratio in line with Lego’s other licensed fare. While it contains some of the reconfigurable land ‘modules’ similar to those you’ll find in the Bunnie and Kapp’n kits, the addition of the house here really ties everything together nicely.
