I’m not part of the audience Disney Dreamlight Valley feels designed for. The games I normally enjoy are shooters or action games. Things I can win or lose with, with cool trailers, character skill caps, and multiplayer capabilities. I’m not a Disney obsession, although I think the odd Pixar movie is good enough. And yet I’m addicted to Disney Dreamlight Valley and it’s taking over my brain.
It’s the perfect cozy little adventure I wanted without knowing it. I play it on-stream, off-stream, chatting with friends on Discord and even muted while watching YouTube videos in the middle of the night. There’s something so mind-blowingly good about Disney Dreamlight Valley that I’ve yet to understand, while also acknowledging that I despise a handful of its design decisions and want Mickey Mouse to jump off a cliff with a ceremonial “ah-ha.”
I didn’t know what to expect from Disney Dreamlight Valley. I’d never heard of its development, which is strange considering I’m so invested in games, and I couldn’t imagine how a Disney game could work so well that my colleague Lauren Aitken would give it the “perfect Stardew Valley/Animal Crossing life-sim hybrid (opens in new tab)“. So why did I start playing Disney Dreamlight Valley? It’s because I wanted to try and understand it.
Life sims often have a short and sweet honeymoon. It’s the way Animal Crossing: New Horizons works when you first land on the island and know that you have so much to do, so much to accomplish in a short space of time. Eventually the days get harder to feel like I’ve made progress, and I’m giving up because my island will never be as beautiful as the one I see on TikTok.
Disney Dreamlight Valley begins the same way, where you can see an entire village growling in thick purple nightthorns and the homes of many residents you’ll no doubt meet after your introduction to Merlin from The Sword in the Stone. Life sims plop you down in the center of something you recognize the potential of, and give you a little push to turn that potential into a tangible reality.
While Animal Crossing’s honeymoon is slowing down considerably so that you have to wait a few days for fruit to grow and fossils to be replenished, Disney Dreamlight Valley’s timing is speeded up considerably. Most of the features you’ll find in the game, with a few exceptions, will be replenished in an hour or less, which means I can just Keep it up. With Animal Crossing, there’s a natural limit to my playing time, but that problem doesn’t exist with Dreamlight Valley, because it knows you’ll be hunted by it in Night Thorns too. And it’s surprisingly comfortable in that spiky undergrowth.
Meet your maker
Disney Dreamlight Valley removes the limits that can sometimes feel like they hold you back. Constantly replenishing crops and naturally occurring resources is pretty awesome, especially if you play it like me, as a background game while focusing on something else. I can make loops and loops of the area while always having something to do and keeping my brain busy. Also, manipulating the island to your liking is much easier in DDV than it’s ever been in Animal Crossing, giving you a bird’s-eye view of the entire island when placing furniture and plants.
The character creator is one of the best I’ve seen in recent years and I really felt represented as a mixed race woman with natural hair. The hair options are better for DDV than for Elden Ring, who would have thought? Plus, you can change these aspects along the way, you’re not locked into how you look, and physical features like facial hair aren’t locked into whatever body type you’ve chosen for yourself. There are hijabs for people who might want to wear them too, making this creator much more aware of the whole spectrum of people who will be playing the game from the get-go. As a child I often didn’t feel like this me I played in games with character creators. In fact Animal Crossing didn’t to have until recently options for black people, so the character creation in Disney Dreamlight Valley was surprisingly appealing.
I enjoy his scarf as much as the pointless gameplay loop
But DDV comes with its own annoyances, such as the energy system, which is a drag, the annoyingly difficult task of approaching animals to feed them, sloppy targeting, and sometimes quests that trap you in shit you can’t avoid. Two examples are WALL-E who wanted to feed animals and followed me until that happened, which was impossible because that task is one of the few things you can do once a day. And the other is the time I accidentally helped curse the whole valley and didn’t stash enough Dream Shards to fix it right away.
There are undoubtedly problems with DDV, but I’ll cover them up as if they don’t exist at all. It’s hilariously bad at explaining tasks. Actually, I had to use my knowledge of what’s in the dish ratatouille to make it in the game, but otherwise people have to look for guides on how to make it. That mechanic feeds animals once a day is never mentioned and almost seems like a bug the first time it doesn’t work. I’m stuck in geometry here and there, and sometimes my character model’s hair sticks out at a 90-degree angle. And yet the fact that there is still some repair to be done makes it all the more fun. I enjoy its craziness as much as the pointless gameplay loop of mining, farming, fishing and tree shaking and I don’t get it Why.
Every time I end up playing Disney Dreamlight Valley, I kind of question myself. Why am I here? What am I doing? Why don’t I play something else now? Mickey’s cold, dead eyes scare me off, and I occasionally have a few weird critters where my perspective flickers across the screen for a moment, but it really doesn’t matter when my rice and sugar cane crops are ready to be harvested and sold to goofy.
I’m not sure what’s in DDV’s code that makes it so appealing and yet I kind of hate it because it’s so much fun now. I don’t quite understand why I enjoy my time as a magical pastel princess so much, but it calls to that little part of me that wanted my wall pink as a kid and played with Barbies. I don’t want to enjoy this game as much as I do, but here I am, having a great time helping WALL-E with his garden, wishing Goofy would shut up when he’s fishing, and chase a rabbit to give it a carrot , time after time.
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