Category: Video Games

Like grabbing a hot drink and unwinding with a good book, Disney Dreamlight Valley makes the hours pleasantly fly by. With two beefy maps to unlock and explore, more than 30 Disney characters to befriend, and a plethora of quests to complete, this Disney-infused cozy life simulator kept me blissfully entertained for dozens of hours – even having already played a whole bunch of it during its Early Access over a year ago. But despite hitting 1.0, Dreamlight Valley still feels as unfinished as it ever has in some ways thanks to persistent bugs, a newer storyline that ends on another unsatisfying cliffhanger, and a merciless grind that not even the wonderful cast of characters can entirely compensate for. That means it still has plenty more room to grow, but this effortlessly charming town game can still feel like stepping into a therapeutic hot spring all the same.

Despite a whole lot being added since my initial Early Access review, very little has changed about the heart of Dreamlight Valley – it shrewdly puts building social links with its iconic Disney characters front and center, then places you on a nigh-endless treadmill of relaxing fetch quests to take on (preferably while covered in a pile of blankets). It doesn’t necessarily stand up to its peers in most other regards, whether that’s its village decorating, its crafting system, or the resource gathering minigames like fishing and farming, all of which are overly simplistic and occasionally monotonous on their own. But what Dreamlight Valley continues to get right is how it makes you happy to tackle those chores when you’re doing so alongside quintessential characters from your childhood, all of whom are perfectly realized and extremely well-written.

Like a Disney-laced Animal Crossing, you’ll walk around town catching fish with Scar, tending to your garden with Mickey Mouse, and upgrading both your home and the village shops by giving big sacks of gold to the ever-greedy Scrooge McDuck in lieu of Tom Nook. You’ll also buy and craft furniture to decorate your abode, and build houses for your growing roster of villagers to settle down in once you’ve completed a quest to unlock each one. But unlike Animal Crossing, Dreamlight Valley focuses a lot less on completing daily rituals to earn money and much more on running quests and telling stories with its memorable cast of characters, who may ask you to deliver flowers to their love interests or investigate the dark presence that’s corrupting the valley. Even if many of those quests require grinding out resources through mining ore or picking fruit from trees, the payoff is often worth it, and adding new pals to the village and leveling up your friendship level with them through questing is very rewarding.

There’s a whole heck of a lot of characters to recruit and build bonds with, from Rapunzel, whose giddy and erratic animations are just the best, to Woody, who will sometimes hilariously decide to play dead in the middle of the level like he’s waiting for Andy to leave. My current favorite is Gaston, who is probably the best written cast member so far. Egotistical, chauvinistic, and lacking the sense God promised a goat, this guy is just the worst… so obviously I had a blast spending a bunch of time hanging out with the dim knucklehead.

Others aren’t quite as exciting, like WALL-E and EVE, who are mostly non-speaking characters that don’t make for riveting company. Similarly, The Fairy Godmother and Merlin are both wise, old magicians who play very similar parental roles in the community, and I don’t know that we needed to pad out the roster with two zany fowls by including both Donald and Daisy Duck. Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas, Vannelope from Wreck-It Ralph, and even the old school legend Oswald (who was just added to the mix recently) are all much more interesting, but with so many great options to pick from, it’s odd how many of the additions feel like repeats of one another.

So far Disney Dreamlight has two major areas to explore: Dreamlight Valley itself, and the more recently added Eternity Isle that’s available as a paid DLC. Both feature the same progression system of doing village activities like cooking and gardening to get a special material that lets you unlock new areas of the map that have more characters to recruit, all while completing quests to improve your social links with said characters and progressing through each area’s self-contained stories. In the non-DLC map, that grind is mostly paced out well, with new areas and characters unlocking just as things start to get monotonous – but in Eternity Isle, it really gets dialed up to 11, with each of the three areas on the island being divided into tiny slices of space that require tons of a currency called Mist to unlock. Even worse, you mostly get Mist by using an item called the Royal Hourglass to play a minigame where you essentially follow a compass to find an invisible point on the map. It’s not a very compelling way to spend your time, but it at least makes for a decent distraction from watering dried out plants.

Dreamlight Valley’s main story, which has you chasing down the physical embodiment of your childhood memories called The Forgetting, can now be completed in its entirety (having previously been drip fed via impressively meaty updates over its Early Access period), and deals with teenage anxiety and the joy of rediscovering childhood fancies in surprisingly poignant ways. It moves a bit slow as you go back to the grind between each major plot development, but the campaign, which took me well over 30 hours to complete, still ends up delivering a memorable tale that covers some serious topics without ever losing those essential, feel-good vibes.

Meanwhile, Eternity Isles has you repairing a ruined kingdom for a holographic Jafar who totally isn’t very clearly planning to betray you the entire time, but its story currently ends on an underwhelming cliffhanger that will presumably be wrapped up in due time like the original’s was. Where that main plot kept me interested with a central mystery that slowly revealed itself, so far Eternity Isles has played out like one of those super cliche stories where the obvious villain (who, in this case, is also literally a very recognizable villain from a Disney movie) tricks you into helping him obtain power, and I just don’t know if it’ll ever be able to pay off super well. But for right now it’s just an annoying dangling thread after hours of grinding, and at least that grinding is still as fun as it was on the mainland.

Aside from completing quests, hanging with characters, and unlocking or exploring new parts of these ever-expanding maps, you’ll also be able to visit the worlds of your real-life friends via multiplayer. While I hoped multiplayer functionality would offer a whole new way to enjoy Dreamlight Valley, it’s pretty limited in practice. You can only do very minor things while visiting, like steal your buddy’s vegetables or buy items from their shops, which might differ from your world. Having visitors or visiting someone else locks everyone’s ability to progress in the story or interact with NPCs, so the most important activities are completely gutted when you’re with a friend. For this reason, my friends and I mostly just hung out in the same Discord chat and played asynchronously, which is a bit of a bummer. It’s great that they included multiplayer at all, but its current implementation is mostly a wash.

On the other hand, a diversion that works out a little better is Scramblecoin, a board game you can play with any of the valley’s NPC residents. By placing miniatures of Disney characters onto a board and competing to see which player can gobble up the most coins, you get to wind down with a nice, little strategy game that serves as an excellent change of pace. And by accruing victories, you unlock new character pieces, each of which has its own movement patterns and special abilities with pros and cons to consider. It might not be the most challenging or sophisticated minigame, but it’s nice to be able to take a break from mindlessly fishing salmon out of the river to give your brain some exercise.

With how solid Disney Dreamlight Valley has shaped up to be in 2024, one thing that’s a little surprising is how many bugs I ran into after returning to it. It’s certainly not as bad as it was during the Early Access period, but I still stumbled into quite a few, whether it was buildings and furniture curiously disappearing during extended play periods, menus locking up until I backed out and reloaded, or even the occasional hard crash on Xbox. This still isn’t The Stablest Place on Earth™, but it’s not so bad that it ever actively knocked me out of that good vibe groove.

To that end, developer Gameloft Montreal has been steadfastly committed to supporting Dreamlight Valley with seasonal updates, regular patches and improvements, and new content (including characters) that continue to give me reasons to return to my beloved valley. They’ve teased both Mulan characters and Tiana from The Princess and the Frog in upcoming drops, and even while I was working on this review, added Mickey’s brother Oswald. They’ve also said that Eternity Isle’s currently incomplete story will get its finale sometime this summer, so it’ll be nice to hopefully get some payoff there.

A bunch of smarmy teenagers with ridiculous haircuts trying to escape the gloved clutches of an alien race of clowns is the kind of absurd and cheesy premise that makes perfect fodder for the asymmetrical multiplayer horror genre. Following in the footsteps of Friday the 13th, Evil Dead, and many more licensed games, the 1988 cult classic film Killer Klowns from Outer Space is the latest horror movie to try its hand at stealing our still-beating hearts with high-stakes murder sports – and it largely succeeded at capturing mine. The chaotic, unabashedly goofy competitive matches had me and my crew screaming with delight round after round, as we turned each other into cotton candy ornaments and popped one another’s red noses. The silly rounds of mayhem do lack variety and eventually begin to feel as shallow as the graves you’ll dig for your victims, which can make the good times fairly short-lived, but the 25 hours I got out of it before hitting that wall were quite memorable indeed.

Bucking the traditional asymmetrical structure slightly, each match pits seven hapless humans against three killers, as opposed to the usual four on one you see in most games that followed in Dead by Daylight’s bloody footsteps. The Klowns are preposterously over the top, and run around turning humans into sacks of cotton candy with ray guns, hunting teens using a balloon hound on a leash, and mowing terrified victims down with an invisible car. It’s truly some of the zaniest stuff I’ve seen in a multiplayer game in a long time, and it never fails to make me laugh. I especially appreciate the little details, like how the Klowns’ shoes make a comical squeak when you walk, alerting everyone nearby to your presence and leaving cartoonish boot prints all over the floor.

Admittedly, it’s nowhere near as much fun to play as a human because they’re just not as original or goofy as their pursuers. You mostly just sneak around searching for weapons, keys, gas canisters, and other things they need to mount an escape. However, getting away does have a novel twist, because none of the rescue options will allow more than three of the seven teens to leave at once. The boat can be repaired, but only fits three people, while the bridge exit is so rickety it could collapse after it’s been crossed by just two (if they’re not slow and careful as they’re crossing it).

During my time in these outlandish bouts, this led to several hilarious and tense interactions where someone on our team would panic and use up one of the exits to escape a dicey situation alone, leaving the remaining survivors in a lurch. Because there’s only four or five possible exits on each of the five maps, that makes evacuation for the remaining six humans a lot more difficult, and you don’t wanna be that person.

It’s also cool that if a human gets killed or manages to get out of Dodge early on, they’re given the option to play a series of simple but amusing carnival-themed minigames, like Whack-a-Klown or a Simon Says memorization game. By completing these, they’re able to help out their remaining teammates with items to improve their chances, like health, weapons, or even a keycard they might need to escape through one of the exits. I’ve never seen something like this implemented in the genre before, and it’s a great way to keep you engaged after you’ve completed your role in the match – especially if you’ve got survivor’s guilt after taking one of the exits for yourself and leaving the others to fend for themselves.

It’s because of things like this that, even though Killer Klowns borrows a whole heck of a lot from the asymmetrical horror games that came before it, it doesn’t feel like an immediately dull carbon copy with yet another cult horror movie’s skin draped over it. Aside from the macabre humor, the biggest shakeup is that, with a full 10-player match, there’s a whole lot more action happening around the map at all times. As a human, you might find yourself coordinating with a small group of survivors to repair a boat and make an escape, while another posse across the map stages a daring rescue attempt to free an ally that’s been cocooned in cotton candy and is slowly being turned into Klown juice. Meanwhile, as a Klown, you might find yourself hunting down and killing a teenager hiding in a porta-potty, while elsewhere your two allies are collecting cotton candy to power their Klown machines in order to trigger the Klownpocalypse and win the match.

Compare that to a single bad guy slowly stalking the halls trying to kill everyone and Killer Klowns feels a lot more chaotic and casually enjoyable, which fits pretty appropriately with its silly-as-heck vibe. With so much going on in every match, the vast majority of them end with at least a few humans making a successful escape, while the Klowns almost always get at least a few kills in, which makes things feel a lot less sweaty since it’s not so all or nothing.

Another way Killer Klowns achieves this is in how effectively humans are able to fight back (and even kill Klowns relatively easily) once they find the right weapons. A solo Klown chasing a squad of four humans is likely to be in quite a pickle once those teens realize they can just turn around and wail on the grinning goof with axes and baseball bats until it’s forced to spend a minute in timeout before respawning. And there’s no carnival games for you to play, silly Klown! But because Klowns don’t have to loot to be powerful, don’t run out of ammo, and only die temporarily, there’s still a ton of reasons for humans to fear their wacky assailants, especially since ammo is scarce and human weapons break after just a few swings.

This means that both sides, Klowns and humans, have to work with their teammates to achieve victory consistently, and whichever side forms a more cohesive unit is likely to win. That’s exactly what I want in a game like this, and it’s absolutely fantastic. It’s an all too common problem for asymmetrical games to become one-sided fights when it’s a single baddie versus a group of survivors. But in Killer Klowns nobody can really go it alone, and I’ve seen a lot more close matches and interesting interactions than I’d usually expect as a result.

Although the tug-o-war between Klowns and humans is pretty nicely balanced overall, there is one major misstep with it: While humans are given multiple ways to learn about and navigate the map as they find an escape, like compasses they can loot that will point them in the direction of the exits, Klowns have no easy way to identify those areas. This means that unless the Klowns get a lucky spawn and wind up near one or two of the exits, they can spend quite a lot of time running around blindly wondering where players ran off to. This is especially painful for newcomers who don’t understand the maps yet and have an even tougher time figuring out where players might be headed. After the first few minutes of a match, when Klowns will have hopefully found a few exits and gained the ability to instantly jump to any point on the map they’ve already discovered, it becomes a lot more of an even fight – but early on the humans have a huge advantage and often find ways to escape before the Klowns even spot them.

As yet another ongoing game you’re expected to play a whole lot of, Killer Klowns has unlockables earned by playing matches, including both cosmetic stuff for pure flair and new character classes and abilities that can have a very real impact in-game. You can get the beefy Tank Klown class that has health to spare, or the small but mighty Brawler, who moves in quickly and uses boxing gloves to knock the snot out of any annoying adolescents. Meanwhile, the humans unlock different archetypes with names like Rebellious and Tough that mostly play the same, differentiated only by some simple stats that might make one person have more stamina while another does more damage with melee weapons. Unlocking the various Klown classes helped inject some variety into my time, and most of them feel great. My favorite is the Tracker Klown, who is an expert at sniffing out slippery earthlings and turning them into spools of sugar with his shotgun.

Unfortunately, all the gameplay-altering stuff can be unlocked after just a handful of hours (depending on how well you’re doing), and after getting a feel for each of them, things become pretty predictable – and therein lies Killer Klowns’ biggest shortcoming. Each of the five maps has a different layout to learn, but all the exits are the same; there’s always a boat in need of fuel and a spark plug, and there’s always a bridge or tunnel exit that requires a melee weapon and a gate key to pass through, so playing as a human never has any variety to it. As a Klown, you’re always just guarding exits, collecting cotton candy cocoons, and killing teens, so your role remains similarly unchanged every match. After 10+ hours, when everyone I was playing with understood the map layouts and all the possible exits, things began to feel pretty repetitive as we started to run out of ways to keep the fun alive.

That’s a major problem for a multiplayer game that only has one game mode and that you’re supposed to be interested in grinding endlessly. There’s certainly plenty of room to keep honing your skills as a human or Klown, learning to dominate those with inferior map knowledge or combat prowess, but that climb becomes a bit monotonous after you’ve seen the same map 50 times and have repeated the same escape/murdering mechanics ad nauseam. It would be great if more maps, game modes, Klown/human character classes, or alternate escape options were thrown into the mix to revitalize things – here’s hoping developer Illfonic is eyeing those kinds of updates in the near future, but for now I found my interest waning after just a week.

Abubakar Salim, the founder of Surgent Studios and creative director of Tales of Kenzera: ZAU, issued a strong statement today addressing harassment both he and his studio have faced since the release of Tales of Kenzera in April.

In a five-minute video posted to X/Twitter (which you can watch below), Salim opens by saying he didn’t want to address the harassment, and that he’s dealt with assertions that he didn’t “deserve the opportunit[ies]” he got from the beginning of his career: “No, it was simply because I’m Black, and I’ve turned my other cheek and just kept doing my thing,” he says.

A needed message. pic.twitter.com/oJaJEeZd61

— Abubakar Salim (@Abzybabzy) May 31, 2024

Salim is also an actor known for roles in Assassin’s Creed Origins, Max’s Raised by Wolves, and an upcoming part in Season 2 of HBO’s House of the Dragon. He goes on to say that he can brush off some of the comments, but “when there’s a constant barrage of them, it’s exhausting.” And, when it came to Tales of Kenzera in particular, the situation reached “a fever pitch,” especially as the game was roped into ongoing harassment campaigns targeting diversity and equity (DEI) efforts on social media.

“Don’t get me wrong, there’s been so much amazing and beautiful support for this game. The fact that it’s inspired so many people and touched, you know, so many lives, it was one of our goals from the outset — to have this positive impact, right?” Salim says. “But at the same time, we are being faced with constant targeted harassment from people who see diversity as a threat. From people who look across the vast landscape of modern media and decide that anything that doesn’t speak to them or centers around them is unnecessary and inauthentic.”

“And look,” he continues, “there’s always a reason why diverse stories can’t exist. You know, it’s always either we’re doing it the wrong way or it’s just there to tick boxes and it’s just beginning to feel like there is no right way. You know, these exclusionary rules continue to stack up and the goalposts continue to shift until, you know, me, my studio, people who look like us, just sit down, be quiet and just accept the fact that you’re outsiders. But I won’t do that.”

“If there are people who aren’t like you in a game, I want you to know that game is still for you,” Salim continues. “You know, if the characters are a different race or a different gender or you know, a different ideology or different perspective, that doesn’t mean the game isn’t for you. It can still be for you.”

It’s that philosophy, Salim says, that inspired him to set Tales of Kenzera at a more affordable price than many other games, going for $20 across Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. But the harassment, he continues, has spurred him to make the price of the game even lower to try to make it more accessible to a larger audience.

He announces that, starting today, the price of Tales of Kenzera will be lower than $15 on Switch, giving Nintendo a shoutout for “acting fast on this.”

“I’m working with the team in bringing this discount to all platforms and it’s gonna start from now to until the end of June because, you know, it just means so much to me, man,” he says.

“I believe this is just one way that I can show you how serious I am about this,” he says. “Games are for everyone. Diverse games, they’re not about taking something away from you. They’re about adding something new because there’s room for all of us.”

Salim’s statement comes at a time where the games industry has seen an uptick in harassment on social media, spurring the International Game Developers Association (IDGA) to issue a statement on the matter in March. At the time, the organization said it was “deeply concerned about the increased harassment of historically marginalized developers and those advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.”

Tales of Kenzera: ZAU is a side-scrolling action game that follows a young shaman named Zau as he embarks on capturing spirits of three monsters as offerings to Kalunga, the God of Death, so that he may revive his father. Salim has been open about the fact that the game was inspired by the death of his own father, and in our review, IGN called it a “touching love letter from a grieving son to their deceased father, told in clever and moving allegories about sending restless spirits to the afterlife, that helps it stand out in the pack.”

In his video today, Salim concludes by sending a message to other developers who have told personal stories that “uplift the marginalized and underrepresented.”

“Your work is so important, so important today,” he says. “Whether you realize it or not, you are actually setting an example for the next generation of developers, of creators, of artists, just take that in. Keep doing what you’re doing. Thank you.”

Alex Stedman is a Senior News Editor with IGN, overseeing entertainment reporting. When she’s not writing or editing, you can find her reading fantasy novels or playing Dungeons & Dragons.