I would not have been able to survive the last few weeks without “Animal Crossing.”

The latest entry in Nintendo’s life-simulator series released on March 20 during a stressful time in everybody’s life — I had recently come back home from school as the entire world shut down in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. I was social distancing, and for about a week I was alone in my house with nowhere to go and nobody to talk to, and the isolation was beginning to wear on me.

“New Horizons” could not have come at a better time. For the past month, I’ve poured hours upon hours into my island (named Chicago, because I miss it), befriending my villagers (shout out to Charlise and Sterling, my day ones), donating hundreds of fossils to Blathers’ museum, and getting the iconic queen Isabelle to make my village theme the riff from A-Ha’s “Take on Me.” In scary times where it feels like the world is burning before my eyes and nobody will ever be happy again, it’s a relief to travel to the wholesome sunshine world of “Animal Crossing,” where everything is peaceful and the only real conflict is trying to catch a fish that isn’t a goddamn sea bass.

My experience with “Animal Crossing” is one shared by many. I can’t open up Twitter or TikTok without seeing endless posts about bullying ugly villagers and how much the Egg Day special event sucked. It may seem odd that so many people, in the face of a national pandemic, chose to invest their energy into a game where you work for a tanuki kingpin named Tom Nook, but I think it speaks to the power that art has to bond us together and keep us sane in times of great stress.

There’s a certain feeling among some people that, with social distancing giving people more free time than ever before, it’s important to be productive, working on passion projects and maximizing that time to be efficient as possible. And while there is value in keeping yourself busy, in my view, the best thing you can do for yourself in this time is invest yourself in art you love.

On March 27, Dua Lipa released her sophomore album, “Future Nostalgia,” a euphoric record that took inspiration from disco and 80s pop to deliver nonstop bops about love, sex and heartbreak. I had been looking forward to the album since I heard Lipa’s wonderful prerelease single “Physical,” and when it dropped, I had a blast dancing in my kitchen to her absolute banger “Love Again” at midnight. After so many days stressing about the state of the world, Lipa’s album gave me the ability to chill out, dance and forget my troubles.

But art also offers more than just escapism in a pandemic; it can also move you to look at the situation differently, or help you learn more about the world. I recently read N.K Jemisin’s “The City We Became,” a speculative fiction novel in which the city of New York comes alive, and a virus threatens to destroy it. Although the narrative hits home for reasons Jemisin never intended, the book sends an optimistic message about the strength of community and the importance to be there for one another –– a message that has reinforced for me why social distancing is important, and made me hopeful that the communities I love can survive this pandemic.

So binge watch that series you’ve always wanted to get around to, or sink 100 hours into that RPG that you could never commit the time to earlier. This quarantine isn’t ending soon, and in hard times, there’s nothing more affirming and soothing than art that matters.

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Twitter: @wilsonchapman6