Disney Dreamlight Valley is a life sim/adventure hybrid developed by Gameloft that brims with quests, exploration and fun activities featuring friends old and new from Disney and Pixar.
Dreamlight Valley was a place where Disney and Pixar characters lived in harmony – before Oblivion. Night thorns began to grow all over the earth, tearing apart the wonderful memories of this magical place. The hopeless inhabitants of the Valley of Dreamlight, with nowhere to go, hid behind the locked doors in the Dream Castle.
As I said earlier, this is a life simulation, which means that it includes the essentials: crafting, cooking, fishing, building, and of course, welcoming new people to the valley. While the game meets all the requirements you’d expect from a genre, there’s one thing you can’t find here, like Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing. The game has been in Early Access since September 6th. And available on all platforms and digital stores, including Steam and the Epic Games Store.
Plot
You are here because you left your life in the big city behind, only to wake up and find yourself in a rather pathetic place full of purple spikes and surrounded by dilapidated and abandoned buildings. And as soon as you wake up, you meet the one and only wizard Merlin, who explains that you are in the Valley of Dreams, a place that was once an incredibly beautiful harbor where many people lived in harmony, but not now …
Unfortunately, this was not destined to continue, as an evil being known as Oblivion appears and plunges the valley into chaos, dividing all biomes with impenetrable spikes. After that, many characters decide to leave the valley, and the rest lose their memory and forget important details of what happened before and after.
Fortunately for everyone, the protagonist is here, and it turns out that you can use magic and destroy the curse-created spikes that haunt much of the valley.
With this opportunity, you must clear the starting zones of the valley and reach the huge castle. Once you’ve done that, the main goal of the game will become clear to you, as now you have to work hard to get all the characters back to the village, build houses for them, clean up the land and find out who the Forgotten are, and what happened to village, and the previous ruler.
What will we do most of the time in this game
What we will do most of the time in this game After you understand the basic messages and what the game wants from us. Before us opens a large territory, which is affected by the curse. And only we can clear it in order to move on in the story.
As already mentioned, this is a life simulator like Stardew Valley and Animal Crossing, here you need and you can:
- clear the area of curses and stones
- grow different crops
- cook for the residents
- equip the city and your home with different Disney and Pixar items
- look for new and help all characters
So this game should tell you right away what’s going to happen. You will run, clear the environment, complete quests from the villagers that will help you improve relations, which will further help you speed up some processes, such as resource extraction and farm components.
Gameplay
!Careful! Scrooge McDuck will extort money from you!
Disney Dreamlight Valley is in trouble. Fairy-tale characters roam the city, and each of them has a pack of instructions. Catch fish, find special flowers, decorate the area, save coins, invest in a store, grow wheat, and dig a mountain with a pickaxe. There are many orders, and they are all the same type.
At the same time, it is impossible to complete the game without grinding. At the very first location, the wizard Merlin sets two plot objectives: complete side quests for all available characters and accumulate two thousand stones. Nothing is complicated about this, but the process is not very exciting.
While the toughest grind is associated with stones, they are rewarded for inner achievement. What is required to complete the plot: fed three squirrels? There are 100 stones here. Collected ten times? Here are some more stones. Have you prepared a dish for at least three stars out of five? Here is your reward.
And all the tools for work are issued in the first 30 minutes of the game. A shovel, a watering can, a pickaxe, a fishing rod, a selfie phone – with this good you will pump the whole game. Also, don’t forget to prepare delicious treats and craft, craft and craft.
Shareware mechanics are visible everywhere – the heroine is constantly missing something. The energy runs out quickly, forcing you to eat and go home, and the energy increases slightly as you level up, but not by much. Inventory space is minimal. Nothing fits into the chest either, and to improve it, you will need to give Scrooge a very, very decent amount of currency. So sometimes, it seems that Scrooge is the main villain of this game.
Tiringly beautiful
When it comes to lighting, texture quality, and other technicalities, Dreamlight Valley looks simple. The engine is clearly outdated, and not to say that there is at least something innovative in it, but the game will definitely run on almost any device, and I’m not just talking about PC.
However, thanks to the stunning design, you ignore the shortcomings. Artists have drawn a beautiful world with frosty locations from Frozen, sea areas from Moana, or cluttered areas from WALL-E. It’s nice to admire the landscapes, and if you look closely, you understand that these are very small locations, and you can’t say that they differ in details or vastness. I would like the characters’ worlds to be not only for discovering characters in their village but also for the opportunity to travel around them, visit places where the characters were, in order to somehow diversify the action and not just sit in their village … For example who wanted to walk around the castle of Elsa and Anna, or travel with Moana without restrictions on the sea?
No matter how pleasant the visual is, it does not save Dreamlight Valley – the gameplay turned out to be painfully tedious. However, if you are touched by delight at the sight of Mickey Mouse or Elsa, you may turn a blind eye to the primitive gameplay.
Who is waiting for us in this game?
There are currently 17 characters in the game that can start living with you in your village. But if you think about and pay attention to how many old and new cartoons there were, and how many portals are in the main castle, then I hope there will be about 80 or even more on release. And the vast expanses of the village allow it:
Customization
As in any game of this type, you will have a huge opportunity to express yourself, and the game is not limited by anything at all. There are about 1000 different clothing options in the game.
And as for the house, at home you will have many options. Simply by talking to the characters in the world, I was immediately given a separate room. Items and crafting recipes can be found in chests scattered around the world, purchased from Uncle Scrooge for a tidy sum, or obtained by improving relations with the characters. At times, just picking up an item from the ground unlocks a number of recipes.
Hint: Going into item placement mode anywhere in the world and picking up things you see lying around — trees, benches, etc. — will unlock the crafting recipe! Try it!
Multiplayer
There is currently no Disney Dreamlight Valley multiplayer in the game, but Gameloft developers have plans for it. Don’t expect multiplayer to launch anytime soon, as it looks like it won’t be added to the game until 2023, but we’re looking forward to trying it out.
And some advice
- Do not spend money on items from Scrooge unless the quest requires it.
- Need money – make Souffle to help you. Pick up everything and sell it.
- Do not rush to immediately get new characters. Spend your time opening new areas to gain access to a variety of new plants and other crafting materials since it’s very likely that to complete the quest with any new character you will need something that you have not yet discovered.
- If you need to improve the tool for passing the location and you get stuck (for example, due to stumps) you can simply move the teleport well to a closed area
Conclusion
If you’ve dreamed of spending time with Moana, Elsa and Donald Duck, the Disney Dreamlight Valley plot makes it possible. Well, don’t ask for more.
Note: Our review was completed through a verified Steam purchase.
