Hot off of dozens of hours reviewing the sweatiest kind of game imaginable in ARC Raiders, wading into the cozy waters of Disney Dreamlight Valley once again was like stepping into a warm bath at the end of a hard day’s work. I’ve managed to mostly keep up with this charming, Disney-infused life simulator for the past three years, which has been content with adding a handful of new areas and characters here and there rather than innovating in that time. But with its latest expansion, Wishblossom Ranch, developer Gameloft Montreal promised a massive new region to explore atop the back of various recognizable steeds that seemed like a perfect reason to return for an extended stay. It’s without question the most ambitious update yet, with some interesting mechanical tweaks, like the focus on riding and building bonds with horses to unlock new abilities – but that ambition comes at the cost of this being the most buggy version of Disney Dreamlight Valley so far. Similarly, the new map has some of the most creative and unique regions I’ve seen in any cozy game, but that’s offset by new characters that I had a hard time connecting with and the usual, completely unnecessary grind to get through its main quests. All-in-all, I’m still glad to be back in the comforting embrace of this incredibly zen game, but the admirable risks Wishblossom Ranch takes only pay off some of the time.
If you’ve yet to visit Dreamlight Valley’s colorful, cartoonish world, this is a life simulator that’s centered around reconnecting with Disney characters from your childhood and the hopeful, optimistic sense of wonder you presumably had beaten out of you in the years since. You’ll run around performing low stress activities like gardening, cooking, and fishing while hanging out with the likes of Simba from the Lion King, Elsa from Frozen, and Goofy from… well, y’know, it’s Goofy. Wishblossom Ranch is the latest made up compound word followed by a location noun to be added to the mix, and it asks you to solve a mystery surrounding a place where one’s wishes are granted that seems to have run out of magic. While hot on the case, you’ll meet a handful of new Disney characters to befriend, explore and settle the biggest regions Dreamlight Valley has seen so far, and, most importantly, unlock a roster of iconic mounts to ride around on. When all of that is working, it’s some of the best-spent hours this chill adventure has offered me yet.
As the name Wishblossom Ranch implies, the main attraction this time around are the four-legged creatures you’ll tame, each with their own special ability to help you navigate the world and solve simple puzzles. The brave and bold Maximus from Tangled will let you leap across large gaps, while the mighty and battle-tested Khan from Mulan can kick apart physical barriers, and the goofy looking Pegasus from Hercules lets you fly to the highest heights of the mountainous area. You’ll also get to customize and name your own horse (mine was called Neighthan), which has the ability to push around heavy objects with its head like a big ol’ dummy. The puzzles you’ll solve using this suite of ponies are extremely basic, mostly serving as reminders that you can and should switch between mounts instantaneously and use their unique skills to push heavy blocks onto weighted pressure plates or kick obstructions to pieces, but they do a good job at giving you a reason to toggle between each of the loyal stallions and a good reason to level up your bonds with them.
The best part of these new companions, though, is the fact that they solve one of my least favorite things about Disney Dreamlight Valley since the very beginning: how insanely slow you move. I’ve had a bone to pick with this game for many years now on how painfully sluggish it feels to move around, even when aided by fast travel from zone-to-zone, but hopping atop a mount makes travel times so much faster it’s completely resolved that issue. And since you can also train your mount to help with things like stomping on ore deposits to mine for gems or dig holes in the ground for gardening, you can do lots of activities without ever having to dismount, which is a great touch. Really the only issue is that now the old areas feel so claustrophobic and small because you can sprint across them so quickly, and they could already be fairly tough to navigate on foot. Thankfully, the new areas have been designed with mounted travel in mind and are properly expansive, and getting caught in small environments in the old regions is still a lot less annoying than spending minutes on end slowly crawling through them.
Unfortunately, the process for actually improving your relationships with each of these guys can be a bit of a slog, and represents the biggest timegate you’ll find in Wishblossom Ranch, which otherwise does a pretty good job of getting rid of annoying grinds like the one found in A Rift in Time. Every time you unlock a new mount, you’ll have to spend an increasingly long amount of time leveling up your relationship with them until you unlock their unique ability that’s needed to get through the next step in the main story, and the primary way to do that is by waiting for real-life days to go by so that you can feed, pet, and brush them for large XP boosts… or do what I did and spend hours riding around aimlessly, jumping over random objects in the world to brute-force your way through it. I’m sure it would’ve been far less annoying if I would have just played more casually over the course of a few days or weeks as is likely recommended, but I’m really not a fan of arbitrary obstacles to progression that have no point beyond padding out how long it takes to finish the story, and this one is particularly silly. I’m okay with having to earn my social links with each of these quadrupedal friends, but it shouldn’t prevent me from unlocking the next area until I do, especially if the only way to speed it up is by doing meaningless busywork.
The good news is that once I did get through the grind and proceeded to the next region, I was rewarded with some of the most interesting places that Dreamlight Valley has featured to date. For example, the Pixie Acres is a magically-infused garden area with golden honey waterfalls in the distance and waterballoon fish swimming in the rivers, while my personal favorite area, Glamour Gulch, is entirely fashion-themed, and has pincushion fruit growing on trees, flowers that are made out of needles and thread, and mushrooms on the ground that are actually little buttons. The flavor and themes of these places are easily the most clever and compelling yet, and would probably even top the list of some of my favorite locales in any cozy game. It’s especially cool when you start gardening with seeds found in these areas to grow things like a vegetable made out of silk thread or cooking recipes out of those ingredients to whip up an entree called button stew. This is exactly the type of over-the-top goofiness Dreamlight Valley really needed, as opposed to the quite grounded options in the first area where you were harvesting regular ol’ tomatoes to cook tomato soup.
On the other hand, I personally was less enthused about the new characters than the environments themselves. Snow White, Cruella de Vil from 101 Dalmatians, Tigger from Winnie the Pooh, and Tinker Bell are the four new besties to befriend, only one of which didn’t completely annoy me over the course of the story. Snow White’s creepy cheeriness and impossibly high-pitched voice gave me the willies, Cruella de Vil was just straight up mean to me for several hours while I was forced run errands for her when I would have rather just told her to take a hike, and Tigger’s stretch of the story is so untethered from reality that I was just confused about what the heck I was doing the whole time, like one part where I had to reunite a family of balloons with faces drawn on them for some reason. Tinker Bell was genuinely the only one who was consistently helpful while also not boring into me with unnerving, wild eyes. I think this is probably the cast of added characters I connected with the least so far, even though Cruella de Vil did make me laugh by being such an irredeemable monster (as she should be). Don’t get me wrong: I’m sure lots of folks will enjoy adding these icons to Dreamlight Valley’s already impressive roster, and you can always just bring along an existing character you prefer, but man, Snow White is just not for me.
The main thing holding Wishblossom Ranch back, however, is the fact that it’s definitely the most unstable version of Dreamlight Valley so far, and that’s coming from someone who started playing during a preview period slightly before its Early Access debut back in 2022. I encountered all sorts of issues: I phased through an elevator that broke my ability to progress until I quit to the dashboard, my horses regularly hopped inside objects in the world in a super awkward and noticeable way, menus would randomly stop responding to me until I closed them and tried again, and quite a few other bizarre problems. And of particular annoyance, the absolutely atrocious camera problems Dreamlight Valley has always suffered from are amplified by the existence of bulky horses you spend a lot of time trotting upon, whose unwieldy nature cause the camera to clip through all sorts of pieces of the environment and cause a ton of issues. I appreciate that Wishblossom Ranch takes some really neat risks to make these maps bigger and add cool horse mechanics, but that seems to have come at the cost of everything feeling really janky at launch.
At one point I even found myself locked out of a critical quest line that would have resulted in me not being able to see the ending were it not for a developer-provided debug option that let me skip past the blockage. Were it not for the fact that I was working on this review, my journey would have come to a disappointing end right there. There were a few moments during the course of my adventure where it felt like I was walking on eggshells around the expansion’s bugs, and if I did a part of a quest too early or too late, I’d hold my breath hoping it wouldn’t result in a catastrophic error like the one I ultimately fell prey to. The devs at least know about this particular bug now, so hopefully they can fix it at some point, but I would recommend waiting for a round of polish or two before diving in yourself.
