After a short but sweet demonstration earlier this year, I was finally able to dive into Disney Dreamlight Valley for about five hours and explore three unique areas and the Moana territory. I’m a little Disney nerd, so I was excited to catch up with my familiar face. But is there enough quest and life simulation activity to get me hooked? Quoting the famous mouse himself, hey, yes, there is.
You must complete the Mickey, Goofy, Merlin, and Scrooge McDuck quests to get the village up and running. In the meantime, you’ll find the essential royal tools (shovels, pickaxes, watering cans, etc.) to complete the quest and collect resources. Oh, and some very important digging, gardening, and mining for rare gems.
It feels like an understatement to say that Dreamlight Valley is fully functional from the beginning — the quest never seems to stop. If you’ve been able to get the most out of your character’s specific friendship level quests, simply ask them to tag them to fish, farm, or thorn the landscape at night. You can remove it and level up while maintaining the inhabitants. A forgotten valley. It can take hours to raise the friendship level and complete the character’s quest along the way, but that doesn’t mean I’m in the shade. You never want to do anything. When I close my eyes, I can almost hear the mouse singing, “Keep busy Cinderella.”
Removing the night thorns gives you star coins, seeds, and other resources that you can use to create new items and more. Especially when you unlock the cooking stove, planting seeds and water to increase yields can be very relaxing and quick. There are dozens of recipes and ingredients you can discover when exploring new biomes, unleashed by finding mysterious orbs. You can raise your level of friendship by making fashionable snacks to restore energy levels, selling to friends and giving gifts. After all, sharing is compassionate.
I can lead with pride, I can strengthen us
If you want to free the Orb of Friendship from the thorns of the night, you’ll have to spend hours completing the quest and visiting new territories to recruit characters like Moana. To do this, you need to collect a slightly confusing resource, Dreamlight. To collect Dreamlights, complete tasks such as planting X seeds, building level 3 friendships with 3 characters, or simply harvesting fruits. Submitting these collections from the menu or Dreamlight Well in the center of the village will help you generate Dreamlights. This allows you to destroy especially large and stubborn night thorns. To unlock the Dream Castle and Realm, you need to collect a significant amount before releasing the Orb.
It’s easy to miss the Dreamlight system if you avoid Merlin or don’t access the collection menu. Unlock the orbs by generating enough numbers and going out to find new companions. This is the key to opening and exploring new areas and unlocking convenient highway travel stations. But don’t expect it to be available for free. ScroogeMcDuck monopolizes everything useful.
Craft and life sim elements are key points in Dreamlight Valley. Again, creating a table is often overlooked, but you can literally drag and drop anything and place it anywhere on the map within a reasonable range. Moana may want a home by the sea, but enjoys a home slap van in the center of the village until she unlocks Dazzle Beach. In addition to ready-made costumes and clothes, you can also design your own. Not surprisingly, I decided to make a dress with a tiger in order to struggle with the brand. As promised in the demo, you can change everything about what your character looks like on a whim.
Distract from now
Dreamlight Valley was designed to have a long and complex story, but unfortunately the first few hours constantly repeat about the character forgetting things due to a properly named forgetting event, so do that. I was disappointed. Fortunately, it’s very easy to skip most of the conversation and return to the corn harvest or spend the cash you’ve earned on spooky furniture at the Scrooge McDuck store. You will soon discover shadowed figures that appear to be behind all the turmoil, but you still don’t know who they are or what they are.
Ultimately, Dreamlight Valley is more ready than Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley for areas to explore, characters to meet, and, in short, more to do. Even before next year’s “full” release, there are plenty of quests and activities that you can grind to get rewards. Alternatively, you may want to go to the Mega Friendship Hunt and explore as much of the Dream Castle territory as possible. Already, it feels like a perfect game for anyone who wants a long-term commitment to the game. This is welcome news not only for those who are waiting for a big RPG release (Thank you for being late, Starfield), but also for those who want to pop in something. And from their leisure.
What’s more, who doesn’t want to hear the slightly shimmering version that goes forever?
