Like many of you, in March 2020 I picked up a little known hidden gem called Animal Crossing: New Horizons from GameStop on my way home from work. I was already a fan of the series, so this new entry was a day-one buy for me; I was setting up my little island town a few days before we had any idea of the horror that was on its way. Trapped in my apartment and unable to see my friends, I found some comfort in the world of Animal Crossing, even visiting friends’ islands and once doing a book club discussion over Discord while our villagers sat in a room together. Pushed by a deadly pandemic, this life sim became an actual life simulator for so many of us, and after 130 hours hanging out with the Nooklings I began to search for something else to scratch the itch. Finally, in late 2022, I found as good a scratch as any – Disney Dreamlight Valley.
Disney Dreamlight Valley launched in Early Access last year, which puzzled me about an hour after I fired the game up on launch day. Most Early Access games are pretty barebones, and I was expecting to find a very limited life sim that hopefully showed promise. I was astounded to find that Disney Dreamlight Valley, upon its Early Access release, was already a finished game. With around 30 hours of content, very few bugs and glitches, and fully fleshed out mechanics for cooking, crafting, farming, city planning, and decorating, I was really scratching my head trying to figure out what the 1.0 release would bring.
After 20 hours with the full release version over the last two weeks, the answer is not much. Disney Dreamlight Valley is virtually exactly the same as it was a year ago, with a few quality-of-life bonuses and a handful of new characters. So, if they already had a finished game a year ago and were just adding new characters for free post-launch, which many games do, why Early Access for this one?
If you aren’t familiar with Disney Dreamlight Valley, it’s a life simulator where your created character runs a small town inhabited by your favorite Disney characters. You can spend time with them, give them gifts, and perform quests for them to level up your affinity and unlock new furniture and clothing items inspired by the movies they’re from. You’ll start with a handful of classics, like Donald, Goofy, and for some reason Merlin from The Sword and the Stone, and travel to other realms as you build out your farm to recruit new characters. It’s a simple gameplay loop and it works well; complete a quest to get new decorations and money, use that money to upgrade the stores and get access to new items, use those items to complete new quests.
My biggest issue is that despite all the flavor text used to cushion your quests, nearly every single one boils down to collecting ingredients, crafting/cooking something out of them, and then bringing that thing back to the quest giver. There are a few exceptions to this, and they’re absolutely the most exciting quests in Disney Dreamlight Valley. For instance, discovering the lost ice cave with Elsa and unraveling its secrets, or solving the riddle of the beach dungeon, or finding a suitable place in town for Remy to build his new restaurant. These, however, are few and far between, and more often than not you’re gathering four kinds of flowers to craft into a necklace for Moana.
My other primary issue with Disney Dreamlight Valley is that many of the characters seem to lack… heart, perhaps? Many of the heroes are bland, boring, and uninteresting to speak to, much less hang out with. Elsa, Anna, Moana, Remy, and even Buzz Lightyear feel like they’re all severely lacking in personality. All of them have the same disposition, which is just “I’m nice and fun. Do a quest for me!” Meanwhile, the villains are predictably not very villainous. I had though it might be interesting if my villains like Scar, Ursula, and Mother Gothel were scheming and plotting the destruction of the town, but instead they just ask you to do the same kinds of quests as the heroes, just cackling and providing an evil smile while doing so. Disney Dreamlight Valley does feature an overarching story, but it is so dull and forgettable it’s not even worth describing here.
The “classic” Disney characters are the only ones that I feel Disney Dreamlight Valley actually got right. Mickey, Donald, and Goofy are the lovable idiots I’ve always known them as, from old school cartoons to Kingdom Hearts, and they bring a lot of joy to an otherwise very plastic-feeling world. In addition, developers Gameloft obviously realized they needed a Tom Nook to make this whole idea work – and of course it’s Scrooge McDuck, and of course this capitalist king serves his purpose very well. Scrooge owns the general store and construction company, so he’s laughing and swimming in his pile of gold while you’re toiling away over a patch of carrots to pay off your home loan. Classic Nook behavior.
What Disney Dreamlight Valley is lacking in heart, however, it makes up for with its amazingly easy interface for city design and decoration. Simply pressing the F key puts you into an overhead god mode, where you can freely move any building, pathway, plant, or object anywhere else on the enormous map. Similarly, if you’re inside a building you can do the same thing. You always have access to all decorations when in build mode (they don’t need to be in your inventory) and you always have access to all materials for crafting new decorations, no matter where you’ve stored them. In just minutes you can redesign your whole town, which is essential because as each new character moves in they’ll need room for a new house.
Disney Dreamlight Valley also features microtransactions, which Animal Crossing was blessedly free from, but you don’t really need to engage with them at all. The in-game currency that you use to purchase items from the cash shop is called Moonstones, which you can also purchase with real money. These are used for limited time items, the Season Pass, and event items. Scrooge’s store has a selection of random decorations and clothes that cycle randomly each day, and you would spend gold coins there. I have gotten a good 50 hours out of Disney Dreamlight Valley without purchasing any Moonstones with real cash, so I’d say not to worry about it; they’re fairly unintrusive.
On a technical level, I’ve been impressed with Disney Dreamlight Valley since the day it launched. With only one major bug during my 50 hours of playtime, excellent graphics and lighting, and a frame rate that has never dropped below 144 FPS, it’s strangely one of the better running games I’ve played. My PC has an RTX 2060 Super and a Ryzen 5 3600, and I was able to play in 1440p with ultra graphics without a single noticeable stutter. While Gameloft has missed capturing the heart of what makes me love Disney movies, they certainly have impressed me with their use of the Unity Engine to make something this complex run so well.
I’ve really enjoyed my time with Disney Dreamlight Valley, but the fake-feeling interactions with some of my favorite characters and the repetitive quests have finally worn me out. Unless there’s a major update in the future, I don’t see myself playing this as a live service game the way Gameloft so clearly wants (as demonstrated by the fact that they have paid season passes). Disney Dreamlight Valley absolutely excels at letting you customize and slowly build a town in a way that no other game has managed; there’s a lot of fun to be had in building a little fanfiction-like world with all your favorite characters. I recommend Disney Dreamlight Valley to all fans of life sims and city builder games, but if you’re only here for the Disney characters you probably won’t find what your heart desires.
Nirav reviewed Disney Dreamlight Valley on PC with a purchased copy.
