TL;DR: A wonderfully creative and much-needed expansion with great mounts and stunning new areas, held back by frustrating bugs, uneven characters, and unnecessary progression gates. Still cozy, still charming, but in need of fixes.

Sliding back into Disney Dreamlight Valley after a stretch of gaming that could be described as aggressively uncozy was like stepping out of a rainstorm and immediately being handed a cup of hot cocoa by a smiling cartoon woodland creature. I had just come off a marathon with a grim, ultra-hard shooter, the kind that makes you seriously consider learning meditation just to keep your blood pressure at legal levels. So when I opened Dreamlight Valley again, it felt like my whole nervous system collectively exhaled. Three years into this strange, warm, Disney-scented little life sim, I’ve grown oddly attached to its wholesome, sunshine-soaked rhythms. Planting tomatoes next to Elsa. Fishing with Goofy. Listening to Simba dramatically overexplaining his childhood trauma while I pick flowers. It’s always been a kind of cartoon therapy, the gaming equivalent of taking a mental health day but with significantly more cooking.

And that’s why Wishblossom Ranch, this gigantic new expansion built around enchantment and horses and vibes, had me intrigued from the moment Gameloft teased it. Not little intrigued. Not polite intrigued. We’re talking the kind of intrigued you feel when you discover there’s a McRib-shaped constellation directly above your house. The expansion promised a massive new region to explore, a suite of iconic steeds to ride, and puzzles scattered across a map that looked like someone fed the concept of whimsy through a cotton candy machine. Dreamlight Valley, bless its gentle heart, hasn’t changed much since launch. A new zone here, a new character there — nothing earthshaking. But this? This looked like an actual shake-up. Like eating at a restaurant for years and discovering they’ve secretly had a second menu in the back this whole time.

And in many ways, Wishblossom Ranch really is the bold, experimental swing Dreamlight Valley needed. It adds depth. It introduces fresh mechanics. It expands the world in ways that make you wonder why we didn’t have mounts from day one. But here’s the twist: it is also the most buggy, unstable, intermittently frustrating version of Dreamlight Valley I’ve ever touched. Not the cute kind of bugs you chuckle about and move on from. The sort of bugs that make you freeze in place like you’re defusing a bomb whenever you start a new quest, whispering do not break, do not break, do not break under your breath.

It is magical. It is creative. It is delightfully cozy.
It is also held together with duct tape, glue, and maybe a single wish.

Let me explain.

For anyone new to the valley, Disney Dreamlight Valley is a life simulator built around the idea that Disney characters can cure your anxiety. You spend your time doing gentle things like gardening, cooking, fishing, cleaning up mysterious goo, solving magical problems, and listening to Woody agonize about responsibility while you dig up eggs, carrots, moonstones, and whatever other shiny objects the valley has coughed up. It is relentlessly wholesome. It is aggressively kind. It is the gaming equivalent of a soft blanket. And Wishblossom Ranch, on paper, is the biggest and boldest addition to that world yet: a new story about a mystical wish-granting location that has mysteriously run dry.

The pitch feels wide-eyed and earnest in that classic Dreamlight Valley way. You’re sent into this new region to restore its magic, meet a shiny batch of new Disney characters, and unlock a stable of iconic mounts that rewire the entire rhythm of exploration. It sounds simple. It sounds cute. It sounds exactly like the kind of expansion this game has been building toward.

And when it all works, it genuinely is some of the most delightful time I’ve spent in a cozy game.

When it works.

Let me talk about the horses. The horses are the best thing to happen to Dreamlight Valley since Goofy stopped charging rent. Mounts completely change how you move around in the world — and thank goodness, because before Wishblossom Ranch, your walking speed was equivalent to a half-awake toddler trudging through molasses on ice skates. Movement was the single most irritating part of Dreamlight Valley, and mounts show up like a cavalry of blessed unicorns to fix that.

You get a whole collection of famous steeds. Maximus from Tangled, who leaps heroic gaps like he’s auditioning for an action movie. Khan from Mulan, who stomps and kicks through obstacles like drywall is just a suggestion. Pegasus from Hercules, who actually lets you ascend into the sky for a moment and pretend the entire valley bowed to your will. And then there’s your personal mount — customizable, nameable, somewhat adorable, somewhat dopey. I named mine Neighthan. He did not earn the “h,” but he kept it anyway.

Each horse comes with a unique ability, which adds a fun little layer of strategy to traversal and puzzles. They’re basic puzzles, mind you — shove a block here, stomp open a path there — but the simple joy of switching between mounts and making use of their abilities gives the world a playful rhythm it’s never really had before.

But the real triumph is speed. Mounts finally let you zoom through the valley like you’re in a musical montage where the protagonist suddenly gets their life together. I have complained for years about how Dreamlight Valley makes you walk like you’re carrying an invisible refrigerator. Now? You fly. You glide. You sprint like joy itself is pulling you forward by the hand. It is pure bliss.

Unfortunately, to get the best abilities out of each horse, you must bond with them. The process is noble in concept. You feed them, brush them, pet them, take them on rides, strengthen your connection. Cute, right? Beautiful, right? Soul-nourishing, right?

Wrong. It’s a timegate. A slog. A multi-day, real-time grind that stops the story dead until you pet your horse enough times. And you can brute-force it by riding around jumping over rocks for hours as your real-world sanity slowly decays, but the fact that this is even an option suggests the system needs therapy.

I get the idea of bonding. I do. But progress shouldn’t drown in busywork. I already have a job. I don’t need my cozy horse game holding my quests hostage.

Now, if Wishblossom Ranch had stumbled everywhere else but the world design, it would still be worth at least half its asking price. These new regions are imaginative in ways Dreamlight Valley has never dared to be. Every single area feels like someone took a cozy game and injected it with concentrated Disney creativity.

Pixie Acres is a light-saturated dreamland. A honey-waterfall garden. Sparkles drifting in the air. Waterballoon fish bobbing through shimmering streams. It feels like the kind of environment a child would draw on construction paper at age six and a world-class game studio would then reconstruct with better shading and particle effects.

But Glamour Gulch? That’s the crown jewel. A fashion-themed wonderland bursting with creativity. Fruits shaped like pincushions dangling from trees. Button mushrooms scattered across the ground. Flowers made from needles and thread. It’s gloriously absurd. A nightmare for OSHA regulations. A fever dream for anyone who ever sewed a Halloween costume by hand. It’s also one of the most visually distinct, joyful locations I’ve ever seen in a cozy game.

Even gardening and cooking get a glow-up in these areas. You plant seeds made from weird, whimsical materials. You harvest vegetables shaped like thread. You cook meals named things like button stew. These are the kinds of magical leaps Dreamlight Valley desperately needed — worlds that embrace how strange and imaginative the valley could be if the developers really leaned into the Disney of it all.

Look, I wish I could celebrate the whole expansion equally, but the new characters are where the magic dims. Snow White’s relentless cheeriness felt like being shouted at by a porcelain figurine. Cruella de Vil was frustratingly rude every time she opened her mouth, and unlike Maleficent — whose sass I would bake into a cake and eat with joy — Cruella is annoying in that way where you wish the game gave you a dialogue option labeled simply please stop talking. Tigger was a tornado of nonsense, bounding around doing tasks that felt wholly divorced from logic, lore, reality, or gravity. There is a moment where you reunite a family of balloons with drawn-on faces, and I truly wondered if I had secretly been drugged.

Tinker Bell, though? Actually delightful. Refreshingly normal in context. Helpful. Mildly sassy. The one lantern in this den of chaos.

And yes, character preference is subjective. Some players will love these additions. But compared to all past expansions, this group felt like the least cohesive, least grounded, and least compelling.

Friends, Wishblossom Ranch is buggy.

Not cute buggy. Not “haha my horse phases through a rock” buggy. Not “oh well, the camera got silly for a second” buggy.

We are talking quests-breaking, progress-halting, camera-melting, I’m-afraid-to-open-my-inventory buggy.

I phased through an elevator once and had to restart the game. My horses regularly got lodged inside environmental objects like they were auditioning for a David Cronenberg film. Menus died on me without warning. The camera had meltdowns when I tried to trot through older areas, clipping through geometry like it was desperately trying to escape.

Worst of all, one critical quest line completely broke. If not for a developer-supplied debug button — which I used like a shameful little gremlin — I would not have been able to finish the story at all.

I cannot emphasize enough how much this expansion needs a patching marathon.

I still enjoyed my time, but I enjoyed it like someone dining at a nice restaurant while the ceiling leaks in the corner. The meal’s good. The ambiance is nice. But something’s definitely wrong.

Wishblossom Ranch is an expansion I’m genuinely glad exists. It is vibrant. It is bold. It is weird in beautiful ways. It adds movement options the game sorely needed. The mounts are transformative. The new regions are some of the most creative biomes the valley has ever seen.

But it is also uneven. The bonding grind is unnecessary friction. Some of the new characters didn’t land for me at all. And the bugs — the sheer volume of bugs — overshadow so much of the good.

This expansion swings big. And sometimes, it connects brilliantly. Other times, it whiffs so hard it spins itself into the dirt.

But I’d still rather live in a game that takes risks than one that never tries anything new.

Verdict

Disney Dreamlight Valley: Wishblossom Ranch is a charming, imaginative, and refreshingly playful expansion that gives the cozy simulator some of its most exciting tools and environments yet. Mounts completely reinvent how you explore the world, new regions overflow with creativity, and the core Dreamlight Valley comfort remains intact. But the delight is balanced by a frustrating bonding grind, a cast of characters that doesn’t always shine, and a launch-state level of bugs that range from mildly annoying to dangerously game-breaking. With polish, this will be one of the game’s strongest expansions — but for now, the magic is partially dimmed by technical hiccups.