I really thought a little indie game would eventually explode on PC to deliver the Animal Crossing social sim experience we’ve been frisking on our Nintendo Switches in 2020. Several have tried it over the years, but none have achieved the same success as Stardew Valley did with the Harvest Moon formula. The days of small teams eating the lunch of classic Nintendo series may be over, now bigger studios are taking their chance. Smash Bros. finally gets a run for its money from a Warner Bros. Gameand the Animal Crossing on PC experience has arrived on PC, shrouded in House of Mouse.
I admit I went to Disney Dreamlight Valley to breed a grudge. I wanted an underdog story, not just a big studio licensing a big brand to buy Nintendo. “Those character designs look so Fortnite-y,” I grumbled to myself last week, belie my prejudice even to myself.
And yet Dreamlight Valley’s art style, classic Disney characters, and shockingly indulgent building system had me hooked within two days. This is what I was waiting for, and frankly it’s even better than it took to convince me.
Everything the light touches
For the folks who played Animal Crossing: New Horizons in the depths of 2020, but have since left their Switches in the dust (me, this is me), I’ll list the similarities and differences in the most efficient way possible:
- Dreamlight Valley has a character you can customize and dress the way you want, a house you can decorate in the same way and freedom to design the city too
- It has a local real estate mogul (Scrooge McDuck) and a shop with a selection of clothing and furniture items that changes daily
- It has familiar characters with their own homes in the village, and like AC:NH, someone you know inexplicably hates one of them – I’ll eventually find out what my fellow PC game writer Chris Livingston has against Goofy
- It also has an endless list of chores: digging up treasure, collecting flowers, fishing and mining, all the ingredients in the crafting system
- There is even a day and night cycle linked to your local time
That’s most of what people like me will immediately know who are looking for another busy work sim to finally get off the ground on PC. Make no mistake, it’s very Animal Crossing.
The most gripping quality of Dreamlight Valley is that it really keeps you busy all the time with all these chores and quests and meters.
Dreamlight Valley, however, goes beyond AC:NH. It may not have the tantalizing promise of turnip stock futures, but it does have a much larger, centralized story. Minnie Mouse is missing and the former ruler of the valley has disappeared as a plague of nightthorns takes over the land and the inhabitants suffer from constant ‘forgetting’. Of course, you are responsible for setting things right with the power of friendship and a tireless quest for flower picking.
New areas of Dreamlight Valley become accessible as you progress through the story, earning upgraded tools and building friendship levels with characters like Mickey, Goofy, Merlin, Remy and Moana. Where Animal Crossing obscured things like how close you have a relationship with a villager, Dreamlight Valley is obsessed with numbers. You have a personal level, a friendship level, currencies and star ratings for every dish you cook.
Food is another key social sim feature that Dreamlight Valley has folded into its recipe. That’s where I first started to feel the places where it allows you to experiment beyond mission guidelines. Once you have access to a stove, use recipes to combine lettuce with vegetables grown for a salad and fish with wheat for a fish sandwich. Characters will ask for certain dishes during quests, but you are free to go off the book, and sometimes you have to. I’m looking at you, raw food recipe.
The fish sandwich, for example, was one of Goofy’s favorite gifts for today. I didn’t have the recipe, but made an educated guess that a fish and wheat would do the trick.
All about that base
I can’t possibly put this game down when I know that tomorrow may have the perfect potted plant in store to sprinkle my fence with.
As always for me personally, the build system is the selling point. While it was immediately clear that Dreamlight Valley would let me decorate my own home, and I had already discovered some relatively nice customization options for certain garments, I hadn’t initially clocked in that almost the entire valley could be redecorated to my liking.
There’s no option to terraform like in AC:NH, so you won’t be moving ponds, but almost everything else is fair game: trees, paths, buildings and all sorts of decorative objects can be picked up and dropped down wherever you want at no cost , however often you want to. You can even steal outdoor items that start the valley for your home decor needs.
What I did next will be known to my fellow Stardew farm planner freaks.
I cleaned up the place. Without regret, I beat down trees and planters and light poles in my personal inventory. I experienced self-doubt, knowing that I would probably end up refurbishing, looking at images of perfectly rearranged valleys from other players online and complaining about my own skills. And yet this is always the ticket for me. I can’t possibly put this game down when I know that tomorrow Scrooge might be selling the perfect potted plant to spice up my fence.
The most gripping quality of Dreamlight Valley is that it really keeps you busy all the time with all these chores and quests and meters. While Animal Crossing’s daily fruit-growing schedules had us all deep into existentialism, pondering its pace while we were locked in spring 2020, Dreamlight Valley (for better or worse) doesn’t want you to put it down. Trees grow fruit in a matter of minutes, not hours. The list of “Dreamlight duties” — little performance-style tasks that ask you to “sell two fish” or “cook a four-star meal” — is bottomless. Your energy replenishes as soon as you set foot back in the house.
It’s a social sim designed with a slightly insidious one-more-thingness that I’m particularly prone to. This will undoubtedly result in screen time limits in households with children.
I barely mentioned the characters themselves because I honestly expected a game to sell solely based on its lick of Disney paint. Many people will have a special pleasure baking Mickey crackers and listening to Goofy’s silly family history, eventually exploring the realms of Frozen and Ratatouille and the few others included in the early access release. However, to me this is just a solid social sim, with or without the long shadow of the big mouse brand.
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