Disney Dreamlight Valley looks like Animal Crossing meets Mickey Mouse

When licensed life sim Disney Dreamlight Valley was revealed in June, I cringed while simultaneously letting out a little “ooh” of excitement. See, Animal Crossing and animated Disney movies have both long been big deals in the Wheeler household, and the new game seemed to be riffing heavily on the former. A fresh gameplay trailer, watchable below, only cements that further.

As you’d expect from a life sim, Dreamlight Valley lets you dress your avatar how you like, make your own furniture, go fishing, do some gardening and play nice with the locals. That means a plethora of Disney favourites such as stalwarts Mickey Mouse and Goofy, along with relative newcomers from Pixar’s movies such as Moana and the characters from Frozen. Most interestingly though, you can take on quests for villains such as The Little Mermaid’s octopodean Ursula. Does that make her the Tom Nook of this game?

There seems to be a trend right now for humongous entertainment companies to take the successful formulae of Nintendo’s first-party output and apply them across every platform, free to play. Case in point: MultiVersus from Warner Bros, which soft-launched into an indefinitely open beta yesterday. The Smash Bros-like is already performing well on Steam with more than 140,000 peak concurrent players. Disney and Dreamlight Valley devs Gameloft are trying it with kart racing too, as they’re expecting to launch Disney SpeedStorm sometime this year.

Disney Dreamlight Valley enters early access for PC on September 6th, and you'll be able to find it on Steam. It’s also coming to consoles. If you'll excuse me, I'm off to hang out in the Glade of Trust.