Can you spend your time just walking around in Animal Crossing?

My three-year-old daughter loves to just walk around the landscape of whatever game I've got in my Nintendo Switch at the time, which is great, but I'm trying to play LoZ: Skyward Sword at the minute and she's getting frustrated at the bats flying around and hitting her in the head and it's stopping me progressing out of the Knights Academy where she seems to be "safe" to walk around...

I had the thought that I could just buy Animal Crossing: NH for her since my understanding of the game is you're just managing your own little village (I've never played one!) so I was hoping she'd just be able to walk around this little village to her hearts content without some NPC interrupting her merry little path...

Is this the case or are there similar fiendish interruptions that would annoy her?

Animal Crossing New Horizons does have scorpions that walk on the ground, as well as spiders that fall from shaken trees. However, the scorpions won’t kill, they will only make the player faint, and make the player respawn at their house, no matter where they fainted on the island. I do believe there are some sort of “spawn condition” for these dangerous critters that I am not aware of…

I think you should be safe if you just stay in the village, but I can’t be 100% certain.

Hope this helped.

As previously mentioned, there is minimal danger from just walking around your island apart from mildly dangerous bugs. Spiders and scorpions both only spawn at night (real time), so if this is a problem then you could set your Switch's internal clock to daytime again and the bugs go away.

Wasps can occasionally appear when a tree is shaken, which may happen at any time of day. These flying annoyances can sting your character the same way a spider or scorpion would. They only appear when their nest happens to be shaken loose from their tree, unlike their creepy crawly counterparts which merely spawn at night.

For your daughter I think is Animal Crossing is an excellent and safe game, but just be aware that the game requires you to build your island from the ground up - so there may be little for her to do on the small island, and activities are especially limited for the first 24 hours (real time) while your character settles in.

If you wish, you can read more about the three dangerous critters of Animal Crossing here.