Video game review: “Disney Dreamlight Valley”

“Disney Dreamlight Valley” is my most frequently played video game lately. Launched in 2023, the game is basically “Animal Crossing,” but with various Disney/Pixar characters. The premise? You’re in charge of a magical valley where all these characters live, and spend your time doing (basically) chores, solving the characters’ problems, fixing up the Valley, and so on.

There’s a general overall plot: an event called “the Forgetting” caused the Valley to fall into disrepair, with most of the characters returning to their home “realms” (their native source material’s realities) and forgetting about the Valley. The player eventually returns to the Valley (implied to be some sort of dream-based alternate reality where they spent part of their childhood), and sets out to start fixing up the Valley, while visiting the characters’ various realms and getting them to come back. Merlin from “The Sword in the Stone” serves as the first character met, as well as the general guide to various missions and the Valley’s magical nature. Another main character is Scrooge McDuck, who runs the game’s store where (big surprise) you can buy various stuff (from furniture to decorations to clothes) with in-game currency. Scrooge is also who you pay to construct or upgrade houses.

I assume Scrooge is getting his supply of generic stuff like furniture/appliances (ones not tied to a specific setting like “Frozen” or “Cinderella”) from Duckburg (somehow). Though ”Dreamlight magic” and “the game’s some sort of alternate realm” probably also handwaves some stuff, such as the characters already having lives, family, etc. in their native realities. (Scrooge sometimes mentions his money bin and, in one conversation, getting a new feature from Duckburg’s zany inventor Gyro Gearloose.) That said, it’s still odd the game has heroes like Simba and Ariel living alongside their evil foes (Scar, Ursula). Though at least some of Ariel’s in-game dialog mentions she’s still wary about Ursula.

Highlights

During conversations with some characters, you can mention things that didn’t exist in their world/time period, such as hamburgers (to Anna from “Frozen”). The explanation of what a camera is to pre-19th century characters like Hercules or Snow White tends to be variants of “a device that makes drawings quickly.” Snow White (in the “Wishblossom Ranch” expansion) calls Cruella’s car a “metal carriage.”

A Hercules character conversation allows you to reference metric or Imperial units. For Imperial units, you explain what those are to Hercules, and the conversation quickly ends with him confused. For metric units, a longer conversation is had, with the player mentioning metric is the system used “all over the world” (though Herc is still used to ancient Greek units). The game is created by Gameloft Montreal, a Quebec-based division of French video game studio Gameloft… and, of course, metric units are what nearly the entire non-US world uses.

Scrooge’s character and catchphrases draw from his “DuckTales” (1987) design, with a blue frock, though the Scrooge construction signs (part of the game mechanic) uses his comic version (with an orange frock).

Vanellope and Wreck-It Ralph add some odd meta elements to the game, as they’re aware they’re video game characters, but assume the Dreamlight Valley setting isn’t a video game?

The Wishblossom Ranch expansion (which I recently bought) is an extra region added to the game with a horse ranch (run by Snow White), a new storyline, and new areas/characters/elements. You also get to customize your own horses. The new characters: Cruella De Vil, Tigger, Snow White, and Tinker Bell.

The game’s regular version regularly adds new characters. As of this writing, October brings to the game Oogie Boogie from “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”

The player’s character can be made masculine or feminine, but the game’s characters and dialogue treats the player in a gender-neutral fashion. This extends to the clothes you’re given and can wear—characters will give you dresses along with pants as rewards, and won’t care what you’re wearing (besides Cruella being, well, Cruella). A Pride Month free download gives you multiple shirts, each colored in the different Pride flags. They’ve kept adding new Pride Month stuff each June since, despite the current US political environment (and Disney’s own questionable actions). Maybe the game being made by non-American creators helps?

“Dreamlight Valley” offers various companion animals, though one option added on “Star Wars Day” is having a Droid sidekick. Thus, I’ve gotten R2D2 and BB-8, with the latter currently following me around (and helping increase some materials obtained, as a companion mechanic).