Disney Dreamlight Valley: Festival of Disappointment

Disney Dreamlight Valley keeps chugging along in 2023 with its first substantial update of the year, adding new villagers to complete quests with, a bit of main story content, and more. But much like the last big update, it’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t quite deliver on what we’ve been expecting.

Let’s start with the “main quest” part of the update. Though rather incidental to a lot of other stuff going on in Dreamlight Valley, there is the whole darkness and forgetting mystery you are supposed to be unraveling and this winter update does add just a pinch with a mysterious blizzard happening in the Frozen Heights, but unlike multiple other instances where you open up a similar place in other biomes and it leads to some cool underground area, this is one very basic cave with really one puzzle and then you are done, it doesn’t reveal a ton of new information either.

The lack of new info is fine, for all we know this main plot might never actually end as is the nature of these types of games but the sparse amount of stuff to explore and do is disappointing frankly.

With this new update, you also get two new residents to add, Olaf and Mirabel. Olaf has a mildly entertaining questline, but oddly enough has no dwelling of his own. And rather than hanging out with Elsa which would make more sense, he makes his home with Kristoff and Anna. But what I really want to talk about is Mirabel and more importantly, her home.

Yes, Mirabel has her own dwelling, and as you might know, it’s the magical Casita from Encanto, which is a magical house that is huge with many magical rooms that are filled with her family members. Now, I don’t expect Disney Dreamlight Valley to give me all that, it’s a huge ask.

But the Casita is a huge building, to the point where it’s actually challenging to figure out where it can go (I ended up putting it on the beach) and the inside of it does not reflect this fact at all. When you go inside, all that is in there is one very plain room that Mirabel stays in. Why even bring in the Casita then? Most of the residents of the valley do not stay in exact replicas of their homes, it’s more something symbolic of their character. Buzz and Woody aren’t in Andy’s room, Prince Eric is in a palace but it’s a mini one, etc. You could’ve easily put Mirabel in something simpler that is representative of Encanto because this is just doing a disservice to that amazing building in the movie.

Finally, the thing I honestly cared most about in this update, the storage update! Yes it isn’t as flashy as the new characters or even the premium store you can finally spend real money in (I’m not really going to address that as it’s just a cosmetics shop with a rotating inventory, not super important), and boy does it suck. They do introduce larger storage chests you can build, but even the medium ones are pretty resource-intensive, and the large ones? Well I can’t even think about making the large ones because they need plenty of Dark Wood which only spawns in the Forgotten Valley and is rare to the point I haven’t even seen any in my recent playing.

To be honest, I’d care less about the chests if you could simply stack items better which seems like something that should be a simple matter to address, but as of yet they have not so storage remains a chore no matter what in Disney Dreamlight Valley.

So again I’d like to stress that I still get a lot of enjoyment out of the base game of Disney Dreamlight Valley. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t even bother coming back for these updates in the first place. It’s just more that they seem to not even promise that much and still under-deliver. But also Disney Dreamlight Valley is very much a work-in-progress, we aren’t even completely sure when it’ll hit 1.0 for a “full” release, whatever that even means at this point so seeing how it progress’ can be interesting as well and there’s always room for improvement, I’m just really hoping every update isn’t just a couple characters and nothing more, occasionally they really need to drop something that changes things up or it will get stale before it’s even ready to come out of early access.

That’s all for today, as I mentioned in the last entry there is new Midnight Suns content dropping this week so hopefully, I’ll be able to write about that this weekend, see ya real soon!