100ft wide, but about 10ft deep.
What is Disney Dreamlight Valley (DDL or DDLV)?
Disney Dreamlight valley is a life simulator (farming, designing, mining and foraging etc.) and was released Ausgust of 2022 by GameLoft. It features all sorts of popular Disney Characters such as Elsa, Ariel, and Mickey Mouse (and friends). They also feature some less popular characters like Merlin and Scrooge McDuck. The gameplay loop isn’t reinventing the wheel, but with mickey mouse themed furniture and gardening to be done- most of the life simulator community was absolutely elated to see this title released.
DDLV Introduction
DDLV has much of the life sim staples when it comes to gameplay, upon opening the game, we’re given an introduction and asked to create a character. You have some good options, but nothing too spectacular to make it a particular highlight. Think the same kind of options you get from Animal Crossing: New Horizons- but maybe with a couple more options involved. After making your character, you’re entered into “The Valley” as the characters call it, and you meet Merlin- who gives you a quest and introduces you to the premise of the game. Here you start to unlock all your tools- pickaxe, shovel, watering can, fishing pole and a camera. We now get to be officially set loose into the game!
Likes:
1. Villager relationships and bonuses
The game kind of forces you into having relationships with each of the villagers. That aspect annoys me, but I do like that you can pick a certain task that the villager will provide bonuses for- like foraging, mining and gardening. Picking these will give you item bonuses when doing those tasks while “hanging out” with them. It’s pretty neat, and gives a good reason to have the relationships in this game other than just… marriage or something.
2. Crafting and Cooking comes from all of your inventories
Very cool quality of life thing, you don’t need to have the items needed to craft something in your actual inventory. You can just craft it as long as it’s in a chest somewhere.
3. You can set the visual time to be earlier
As someone with a busy college student life, I essentially only get to play these games really late at night. I play animal crossing with my clock 12 hours ahead so I can see my island during the day. In this game, you don’t have to go into your settings for this, you can set the game to be visually day time, but the clock itself will still be your actual time. It’s nice when you don’t want to run around in the dark all the time.
4. The game is fun when it’s not broken
The game itself has a nice gameplay loop and is fun to play when it’s not broken or doing something annoying. I don’t have a hard time setting up goals for myself or wasting a couple hours designing a part of the Valley.
Dislikes:
This is when I start getting into a lot more details- this game has a lot of problems but bear with me here!
1. Energy System
And here comes the problems I started to have. Disney Dreamlight Valley uses an energy system like Stardew Valley, but the game is real time based. So every time you’re hanging out and power farming gems or fishing, You either have to pack your inventory full of food or go back to your house to instantly refill your energy. This starts to be annoying. They have a leveling system that increases the amount of energy you have, but it doesn’t make any meaningful change because you’ll find yourself annoyed that you have more energy, since now all the food you make wont fill up your whole bar. The system is completely inbalanced, and if anything encourages you to just go back to your house for 2 seconds and walk back out- it starts to feel like a minor annoyance that just breaks up the gameplay, as there’s really no other reason to walk into your house constantly. Punishing game design elements can end up being annoyances to try and work around, especially in more casual games. The energy system works in Stardew Valley because it will last you all day and forces you to make gameplay choices on where you’re going to use that energy every day. It also marks the end of the day- so it feels like it fits in, as opposed to DDLV’s real time system, which I have my own gripes with.
2. The game struggles to use the Real Time Clock
I don’t have anything against real-time games. I enjoy them even, I like the slow paced out gameplay of stuff like animal crossing and FFXIV’s Island Sanctuaries. However, in this game I struggle to find a reason why they did this. All crops grow within a span of hours- unlike other games where crops take multiple days or even just more than an hour (or sometimes less!) The only thing I’ve found that works with the real time clock is Scrooge’s store which is reset daily, and the villager gifting system. There’s some quests that take multiple days to complete- but that will end up driving you nuts as well, since the rest of the game doesn’t work that way, it’s strange to suddenly make the choice to use the real time clock in that way.
3. Inconsistent Writing
In this game, you’ll complete a lot of quests for each of the characters in the game, and as things happen things will seem like they should change in the valley. The problem is, a lot of the characters quest lines will mention being connected to a different character, but the other character will be experiencing a completely different story when you talk to them. Something dramatic will happen with Mickey Mouse, and there will be a heartfelt cut scene, and immediately after Mickey will say something like “Boy oh boy what a beautiful day!” Like Mickey your girlfriend is trapped in a limbo realm alone and scared! It’s not that I’m looking to be riveted by this game, but a little consistency would be nice.
4. Mickey is terrifying.
This may sound weird or like I’m splitting hairs here, but this isn’t necessarily just true for Mickey. I would like to talk about Mickey here though because the dude genuinely scares me- every time he asks me to follow him somewhere for a quest I feel like he’s going to take me to a secondary location that I will never return from. His eyes are dead and his expression never changes, his girlfriend is in literal Disney sparkle hell and he doesn’t care. That mouse horrifies me. The models in the game are okay most of the time, but there’s a lot of strange glitches and bugs that will sometimes require you to reset the game or teleport somewhere to reset the character. Their faces can be scary and lit weird, I have so many strange screenshots of Donald Duck and Ariel I don’t even know where to begin.
5. Bugs, glitches, and a glorified alpha product
What the category says, I can’t possibly list all the issues here but I can give a small list for you:
- Some characters will get stuck in a loop while pulling more items out of mining nodes. You need to push them or reset them by teleporting somewhere.
- Sometimes you’ll place or move too many objects in the world. Your game will crash. You will have to completely redo all the work you did.
- When characters come into your house, they will stand in your doorway. When you try and walk out the game will crash.
I’ve also seen glitches that happen when you place certain furniture items in certain places that will force you to restart your entire game, scrooges shop just… stops resetting, or some interactions never happening and no way to fix them. This game is a buggy disaster.
So, is it worth it?
Disney Dreamlight Valley isn’t worth it right now. The game is plagued with Early Access problems, and I don’t think they’ll be going away any time soon. I am currently playing on the xbox gamepass, but if it went off the pass I wouldn’t spend the money on it. The game would be much better if it was released without all the bugs, and didn’t feel like a thrown together mess. When the game itself is brazenly taking mechanics and systems from life sim titans like Animal Crossing and Stardew Valley, comparisons are drawn and it starts to be looked at as something that can and should be compared to the quality of those games. The game is lost in a sea of what they want to focus on, and seriously suffers for this. There are a lot of things in the game that point towards it being something that could take off and be great, but right now it’s in a space where I don’t think it’s worth the money. If things change and it makes some serious improvements, I’ll update here. But until then, I would stick to your tried and true titles. When this game is fully released I will probably come back with an updated review.
Who am I?
I’m a prolific life sim and build game player with 100+ hours in many games like Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing and Sims. I had one of the early rank 10 FFXIV island sanctuaries and genuinely have a passion for the genre! I have also worked in game dev as an artist and love being caught up on the latest titles.
