Disney Dreamlight Valley (Early Access)

Posted:  Sep 08, 2022
SDHQ BUILD SCORE: 
Full StarFull StarFull StarNo StarNo Star

Review

It is time to dive into the magical world of disney in this life-sim adventure game where you must save the idyllic land of Dreamlight Valley. Once a paradise of Disney and Pixar characters, this place was corrupted by the Forgetting, which threatened to sever all the grand memories associated with the territory. But thanks to you, you can save them all and bring the light and magic back!

Discover secrets and forge friendships with your favorite Disney and Pixar characters like Wall-E, while also decorating your home and putting together some awesome outfits. And hey, settle where you want to as well, whether it be on a beach with Moana or even Wall-E (I like Wall-E). In the end, you choose the way you play and the life you build is completely up to you.

This is an early access game, so a lot is subject to change over time until it releases, but so far, it has been okay. On max settings, the game tends to hit 23W draining while temps go to 80+ and framerate stutters around 30-35 FPS, but with the right changes, we were able to get a solid 40 FPS build with around 3 hours of battery life.

Disney Dreamlight Valley max settings

While the game looks nice at max, it is highly unstable and drains way too much. And this goes even higher when actively running around!

We also noticed that Dreamlight Valley tends to use more power based on what you see, so when in menus and not looking at much rendering in, you will have better stability and drain less battery. Unfortunately, this means running around and assets loading in can be a decent strain, so I felt setting the Distance Quality to "PC Low" solved this, keeping stability with pop-in not being nearly as bad as I would have thought. You can change this to "PC Medium" which does get rid of most of the pop-in, but there's definitely instability at the 40 FPS mark (could switch to 30, but will still see minor dips).

I also want to mention that this game DOES have cloud saves, though you need to sign into a 3rd party account to do it at this current stage, but it does go across multiple platforms. You should also use Proton GE, since the game crashed multiple times for me using regular Proton.

Overall, the game is in a pretty decent state for early access. I do wish it ran a bit better and had more fleshed out graphical options, but I am willing to give it the benefit of the doubt! So far, so good though!

Screenshots:

Comparisons:

Left ImageRight Image

Max Settings vs Recommended. There is a decent drop in visual quality, but not enough to justify a 1.5 hour battery drain with an unstable framerate!

Left ImageRight Image

Draw/View distance here. Medium definitely looks better, but way more unstable. Just by standing there, you can see 2 little spikes on the framerate graph. Moving around makes it significantly worse.

General Screenshots:

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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SDHQ's Build Score Breakdown

Even though there are some issues to work through, I felt a hint of magic coming from Disney Dreamlight Valley.

Build Score

Performance: 
Full StarFull StarFull StarNo StarNo Star
VISUALS: 
Full StarFull StarFull StarNo StarNo Star
Stability: 
Full StarFull StarFull StarNo StarNo Star
Controls: 
Full StarFull StarFull StarFull StarNo Star
Battery: 
Full StarFull StarFull StarFull StarNo Star
Noah Kupetsky
A lover of gaming since 4, Noah has grown up with a love and passion for the industry. From there, he started to travel a lot and develop a joy for handheld and PC gaming. When the Steam Deck released, it just all clicked.
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$39.99
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