Of course, I want – like anyone who played The Sims in the year 2000 – to be mean to Mickey, to stir up trouble, sling a few insults and give him something to really say “gosh” and “aw, gee!” about. Let me wash Remy the rat’s dirty dishes with a watering can! Let me craft a trellis arch out of sticks! Let me advertise Scrooge McDuck’s store by wearing a T-shirt with his face on it and let me eat seven apples in a row so I don’t die of exhaustion! This is living – or at least, simulation living. There’s so much to do and see and it’s very difficult to get bored. ‘The sheer amount of stuff in the game can be overwhelming’ … Disney Dreamlight Valley. (For example, if you go ahead and bake the crackers Mickey asked for without first talking to him, leading him to your house, and talking to him again, your quest won’t be fulfilled.) But even these criticisms reveal just how endless the game is. The game’s multistep quests are also frustrating, demanding that you do everything in a precise order.

Truthfully, the sheer amount of stuff in Dreamlight can be overwhelming (it’s daunting and a little disturbing to be told you’ve only acquired 8 of 973 possible furniture sets).

Real or virtual, it’s Mickey’s world, and we just live in it. Goofy’s home in the game has Nordic-style dining chairs emblazoned with silhouettes of Mickey Mouse’s head – echoing a recent explosion in Disney homeware. Playing it, I’m constantly reminded of Disney’s ruthless capitalism – this is a game where you can obtain a Minnie Mouse backpack and T-shirts featuring the brand’s iconic castle, conveniently very much like the ones available in real-life Disney stores. Perhaps economists should study Dreamlight Valley, too. I want to know why watering 10 carrots and selling them to Goofy makes me feel so alive. And there’s something about growing virtual vegetables that scratches a primordial itch – evolutionary psychologists should study it. It is the kind of game that etches itself on to your eyelids, so that when you turn it off and look at the dirty dishes in your kitchen sink, you can’t help but see them as a side-quest. I sunk six unthinking hours into Dreamlight before I remembered my real world responsibilities – it’s just as compulsive as the TikTokers say. Dreamlight even rips off ACNH’s rewards programme, rebranding “Nook miles” to “Dreamlight duties”, though it gives it a notably more adult – or at least, Disney adult – interface. In Disney’s offering, these residents are Goofy, WALL♾ and Ursula. In both games, you obtain a home in a strange land and start fishing, digging, breaking rocks, picking flowers, growing crops and crafting to make it as idyllic as possible for new residents. Someone, somewhere called it “Disney Animal Crossing” and with that, I was off to see a mouse about a house.Īvailable on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox, and PC, Gameloft’s Disney Dreamlight Valley is a simulation adventure that owes Tom Nook-levels of debt to everyone’s favourite pandemic play, Animal Crossing: New Horizons. But throughout September, TikTok continued to feed me more and more videos of people claiming to be “addicted” to a game that had “taken over their life”. W hen I first noticed TikTokers effusing about something called Disney Dreamlight Valley, I imagined it was your standard gem-matching mobile game, complete with in-app purchases and the occasional uncanny valley Elsa cheering you on from the sidelines.

Disney game of life