Disney Dreamlight Valley First Impressions

The initial draw of Disney Dreamlight Valley is two-fold. Firstly, Disney fans, of which there are plenty ranging in age and demographic, will always line up for a Disney game. The second appeal is regarding the gameplay promised in this sandbox-style life simulation with resource and island management. Sound familiar? That’s right, this is essentially Animal Crossing with Disney IP. If it succeeds in its premise, it will be a delight. After seven hours with the game, it’s absolutely a delight in my eyes.

This won’t be a full-fledged review, but rather an impressions article designed to help you decide if this is worth your time. I won’t even strive to convince you to play the game explicitly, but more outline what is working so well for me during my time with Disney Dreamlight Valley. Firstly, let’s discuss where you can play this game. You’ll find Disney Dreamlight Valley available on just about everything, including Xbox and PlayStation consoles, Nintendo Switch, PC, and soon-to-be Mac. I’m playing on Xbox, in particular, because this is an Xbox Game Pass Day One release.

The premise of Disney Dreamlight Valley is simple in its setup. Once an idyllic land, Dreamlight Valley was a place where Disney and Pixar characters lived in harmony, that is until the Forgetting. Night Thorns grew across the land and severed the wonderful memories tied to this magical place. With nowhere else to go, the hopeless inhabitants of Dreamlight Valley retreated behind locked doors in the Dream Castle. A former magical individual who helped keep all this at bay has disappeared, but luckily, you just arrived.

Greeted and led through an intro to the basics of the game by Merlin, Mickey, Goofy, and Scrooge McDuck, Dreamlight Valley’s Tom Nook figure, your mission is simple. Clean up Dreamlight Valley, become friends with all the inhabitants and help others join the crew, and adventure alongside Disney characters from major franchises. From the get-go, this was checking every single box for me. In fact, at about an hour in, I fully felt like if it wasn’t on Xbox Game Pass I’d gladly throw $30 at my console of choice for the game.

What works so well in Disney Dreamlight Valley is a mixture of improvements on the Animal Crossing experience with great interpolation of mission-based quest lines that let you interact with Disney characters. Let’s start with the improvements on Animal Crossing first. Things like planting multiple seeds at once while farming and crafting multiple items make it feel impossible to go back to New Horizons any time soon. Not to mention, you’re essentially given all your activities like cooking, fishing, and mining from the start.

I put over 500 hours into Animal Crossing: New Horizons. I’m not dragging the game as a failure. I just think that Disney Dreamlight Valley learned from some of the criticisms fans threw at Nintendo. Rightfully so, too. The second element that works well, the use of Disney IP, was always going to be an easy sell for me. I’m wearing a Disneyland sweater as I write this for goodness sake. Disney Dreamlight Valley was always going to click for me in theory. It just also happens to be a very polished, fun experience.

There’s tons to do at launch, with the implied promise of constant content rolling out in the future as a live-service experience. I think for Disney fans, this is going to be a good game to try and without drawing major assumptions, I believe that Disney fans are also generally pleased by casual games. Disney fans can be fans of first-person shooters or horror games too, but much like the media giant, these casual simulation games invite us to enjoy life’s simpler pleasures and slow down a bit in our daily lives.

As I work to befriend Wall-E, Remy, and others in Disney Dreamland Valley‘s early friendship quests, I can see myself putting quite a bit of time into Disney Dreamlight Valley. Give me a heads-up if you end up playing the game! I think it’s a great start for something that should be a long-term title in my rotation.