Dreamlight Valley is undoubtedly a cosy game. Unless you’re a child or someone with a deep love for Disney and/or relaxing games, it’s probably not going to be for you. However, I’m pretty much a child, and I love Disney, AND I have a soft spot for cosy games, so when I saw the game enter Game Pass, I knew I had to give it a try and oh boy! Am I glad that I did.
Dreamlight Valley will see you rebuilding the world around you while befriending characters from your childhood and recruiting them to set up house in your neighbourhood, all while amassing a fortune and building your dream Disney home. It’s a simple concept that flourishes in its theme and is ridiculously addictive because of it.
If you’ve ever spent days, weeks, months or even years playing games like Stardew Valley, The Sims or Animal Crossing, then Dreamlight Valley should be your ally. As with any good life sim, you can farm, fish, dig, build and furnish to your heart’s desire, but in Dreamlight Valley, you can also befriend the characters you’ve known since childhood. And what kind of heartless monster doesn’t want to do that?
Dreamlight Valley is, more aptly, a nostalgia simulator. Still, instead of just relying on joy at having Wall-E declare his undying friendship to you, the game itself is pretty damn good too. The story is also pretty damn great, regardless of if you’re an adult playing for nostalgia or a child for that Disney magic. Your character arrives in Dreamlight Valley only to learn that there is a mysterious and dark force known only as “The Forgetting” that plagues the land and all that inhabit it.
The Forgetting has made all beloved Disney characters lose their memories. Through cleaning our corruption and helping to rebuild the town, characters slowly start to regain what was lost. It’s a very meta take on becoming an adult and forgetting what’s important to you as a child. But by the end of the game, not only had the characters reclaimed their memories but so had I, the player. Never understatement to power of Disney magic.
Everything you do within Dreamlight Valley manages to feel meaningful and, with that, rewarding. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the mood to upgrade the village or explore and uncover new areas or just spend some time upgrading your abode. Everything feels necessary, and I found it hard to put the game down because of it.
One of the most significant issues I have in the game comes down to unintentional time-based gatekeeping. More than once, I closed the game to go and sleep not because I wanted to (even though I needed to) but because I was just at a point where I could no longer progress.
While many games implement a “real-time” progression system to force players to return daily, Dreamlight Valley doesn’t… well, not intentionally at any rate. It’s just that a good few quests require you to collect things like a specific type of flower, ore or mushroom – for example. And more than once, I found myself unable to progress because said collectable would not spawn until I returned the following day.
