Review: Disney Dreamlight Valley is Filled With Disney Magic

Over a year ago, I bought the Founders Pass for Disney Dreamlight Valley and immersed myself in what I hoped would be a fun, enjoyable life simulator-type game. What greeted me was a game filled with Disney magic, reigniting my passion for exploration and discovery and quickly became one of my favorite games of 2022 and 2023.

Disney Dreamlight Valley exited its beta and entered its full release on December 5, 2023, alongside its first paid expansion, A Rift in Time. The game opens with the player falling asleep and waking up in a strange world covered in darkness and strange purple thorns called Night Thorns. In this world called Dreamlight Valley, the player meets Merlin, a wizard who has forgotten many things due to something called “The Forgetting” and asks for help in remembering what was forgotten.

The player has the mysterious power to draw Dreamlight from the Night Thorns and use that power to restore Dreamlight Valley to what it once was and reawaken the lost memories of each Disney character who lives in the Valley. As the player explores the game’s world, new yet familiar Disney characters are introduced, including Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, Ariel, Moana, Mother Gothel, and more.

It is the player’s duty to uncover what caused the Forgetting, who the Forgotten is, and how to free the Valley from the darkness threatening to tear it apart. In order to do this, players must eliminate Night Thorns, harvest fruit, grow vegetables, mine minerals, build furniture, and help Disney characters with quests that will rebuild the Valley and uncover more of the story.

Thanks to all of these tasks, the game has plenty to do, and it can take players months to complete the main story. For myself, it took nearly a year to complete the full story due to trying to focus on completing everything that was available to do, like most of the friendship quests.

The game found a way to touch my heart with its poignant story about growing up, friendship, learning how to balance responsibility with fun, and how to be okay with not being okay. It wasn’t what I expected when I first started playing the game, but the inclusion of these themes made me really appreciate what the game was trying to accomplish. It also makes sense to introduce these themes of growing up through a game that uses Disney characters, something that many adults my age would have also grown up with.

Despite how much I enjoyed myself while playing, though, that didn’t mean I didn’t fall into a bit of a bland routine with Disney Dreamlight Valley. After finishing all of the available main story, side, and friendship quests a few months prior to the full retail release, I didn’t have much desire to engage in the game, even with seasonal events going on.

I would boot the game up, grab one of the characters I gave the Farming perk to, harvest and replant my okra crops, sell them to Goofy, buy whatever was in Scrooge McDuck’s shop that day, and find all of the daily treasure chests. I decided to wait until Disney Dreamlight Valley exited its beta and jump back in whenever a substantial amount of new content would be added to the game. Thankfully, that time finally came with A Rift in Time, and knowing that Gameloft’s roadmap promised even more exciting content to be coming in 2024, I knew it would be just what I needed to get back into the game.

When Disney Dreamlight Valley’s A Rift in Time DLC expansion pass was released, I actually found myself feeling excited for the game all over again. There are new biomes to explore, new story content focusing on Jafar, and lots of new things to discover on Eternity Isle, making this DLC a great way to entertain fans who have already finished everything the base game has to offer and also amaze new players who don’t want to miss out on the full Disney Dreamlight Valley experience.

A Rift in Time adds Eternity Isle, a brand new location with three new biomes for players to explore—Ancients Landing, the Wild Tangle, and the Glittering Dunes. Multiple locations can be unlocked within each new world using a new in-game currency called Mist. Mist can be obtained by completing Mist Duties and Eternity Isle tasks, completing Eternity Isle quests, and by using the new tool, the Royal Hourglass, which allows players to find hidden items across the Valley and Eternity Isle and remove floating rocks. Removing Splinters of Fate, which are similar to Night Thorns, will also spawn Mist, coins, and seeds. 

The new story content focuses on Jafar and his request to the player to help him restore the Royal Hourglass, which had been broken and depowered by the player many years ago. Without the Royal Hourglass, the pathways across Eternity Isle cannot be fixed, and Jafar, who proclaims he is the player’s old friend, is unable to leave the palace where he resides. By preparing the Royal Hourglass, players can free Jafar so he may “help” the player rule the Isle. I was able to finish the currently available storyline within a week and a half, although I feel as though I was rushing to get through it, so I’m sure it will take others more time to complete it.

As the Royal Hourglass regains its power and the pathways to the Wild Tangle and Glittering Dunes are repaired, players are able to interact with the three new Disney characters introduced in A Rift in Time. EVE from Pixar’s WALL-E, Rapunzel from Disney’s Tangled, and Gaston from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast are new characters that can be befriended, and these characters are absolutely delightful.

My favorite, to my surprise, ended up being Gaston, who is not a malicious glory seeker. He’s a lonely glory seeker. Having been left alone, starved, and dehydrated in the Glittering Dunes for countless years, Gaston is just a man who craves companionship and a good meal as long as he gets to say he was the one who thought up a plan or saved the day. It might be my favorite rehabilitation of a villain I’ve seen in Disney Dreamlight Valley yet. 

Disney Dreamlight Valley’s DLC has added a new mini-game called Scramblecoin, a board game where the player competes against various Disney characters using figurines to collect coins on a grid board. Each figurine has its own movement pattern and special abilities that make it easier to obtain coins or move. A player has five figurines in their deck, and they can play up to three on the board. Every turn, the player can remove a figurine, swap it out onto the field, and make a new move to collect coins.

Whoever has the most coins after five turns wins the game. By winning, players will gain a +3 rank and obtain new figurines with better movement patterns and abilities. By losing, players will only gain +1 rank, making it harder to obtain new figurines. I personally have yet to win a game of Scramblecoin, but the game is fun and a nice addition to the game. I do think children will find it a bit difficult and won’t engage with it, but for teens and adults, it may be something they will want to try out.

The DLC also added new ingredients and recipes for players to find. While I appreciate the addition of new food products to grow and experiment with, it isn’t a major draw for me compared to the new stones, flowers, and minerals that can be discovered and used to make new furniture. The game also introduced ancient machines that can auto-cook, auto-water, and auto-collect items in the game. For players who are really into the meta-game of Disney Dreamlight Valley, which involves farming Pumpkins, Canola, and Okra and creating food items like Pumpkin Puffs to increase the amount of coins they earn in order to spend it on house improvements, they may find these machines useful in that pursuit. 

I think my favorite part about this new DLC isn’t the story, new locations, or all of the new items but the actual location designs and architecture. Much of Ancient’s Landing across the Isle borrows from my favorite Disney film, Atlantis: The Lost Empire. This inspiration is present in the base game of Disney Dreamlight Valley, but in the DLC, it is way more prevalent as towering guardians crumble in ruins around the outskirts of the Isle, or pathways glow the same blue as the energy of the Heart of Atlantis and sets up interesting background lore for the Valley and Isle. It may just be a stylistic choice made by Gameloft because a number of people on the team like Atlantis like I do, but I also hope that there is more to its inclusion when the Spark of Imagination storyline begins in Spring 2024.

A Rift in Time adds plenty of great additions, but it also feels like it regressed many of the things that had been previously fixed in patches and hotfixes over the past year. I’ve found myself stuck and unable to do anything while harvesting ingredients due to my Disney companion blocking my path and not moving. I also have experienced countless crashes randomly and whenever I try to teleport to other areas on the Isle.

My favorite, harmless glitch has been with Mist Duties that autocomplete even though I haven’t completed the task. Many of these issues were things I hadn’t seen since the launch days of the game, so it was a bit baffling to see the exact same glitches return in the expansion nearly a year after they had been fixed. Gameloft has been on top of patching issues as they appear, so hopefully, the game will eventually get back to the state it was in before the new expansion’s release.

The base game of Disney Dreamlight Valley is fantastic and heartfelt, reawakening the magic of childhood wonder and exploration. Disney Dreamlight Valley’s A Rift in Time is a great paid expansion so far, with plenty of things to do, and anybody who has been a dedicated base game player will definitely enjoy this new expansion. Some bits of Eternity Isle remain inaccessible, but once the story is updated, I look forward to learning more about the mysteries that remain undiscovered.

Disney Dreamlight Valley is available for PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, Xbox Series X, PC, and Apple Arcade.