A Rift in Time is the first major content expansion to one of the coziest life simulators of recent years. With the strength of a few cartoon characters that marked the infancy for many of us, Disney Dreamlight Valley convinced a crowd and deservingly so, despite some issues with monetization and glitches. For this new era, players can expect to discover a new island with different biomes and a handful of familiar faces, but the drawback is that this release messes up its heartwarming intentions with a few bugs that are impossible to ignore, resulting in an underwhelming expansion.

Jafar Enters the Valley

New players wanting to start exploring this expansion have to complete some Disney Dreamlight Valley quests until they reach the castle. A couple of hours should suffice, but if you decide to go directly to A Rift in Time right after that, you’re going to stumble upon the age-old barrier of reduced inventory space. Juggling quests from various areas simultaneously results in frustrating item management, something that your excessively small house storage won’t help much with. All this to say that new players should put some progress into the base campaign to unlock more inventory space and house upgrades, and subsequently have less worries while advancing on the expansion.

Eternity Isle is the new location to explore, of reasonable size but only three different biomes, and with a brand new story to unravel. The new characters include Jafar, EVE, Gaston, and Rapunzel, but you can naturally see other familiar faces around the new place such as Mickey Mouse, Goofy, and Scrooge McDuck. For the rest, there’s a new tool to use and an interesting board game to play against other villagers, and on the surface, it seems inviting for players who fell in love with the relaxing nature of Disney Dreamlight Valley, mainly home customization possibilities.

That’s not to say that the entire game is relaxing, and it does rely a bit too much on a loop focused on resource grind. The same applies to A Rift in Time, as you set out to clear the land by removing splinters of fate, decorate your new home, help Goofy set up a stall, a store for Scrooge McDuck, and even a Chez Remy, but these are in fact clones of the ones available on Dreamlight Valley, ultimately working as some sort of portal. There are tons of new Mist Duties to shoot for, but also quests erring on the tiresome side, such as mining copper and digging pearls, but the main offender may be the one asking you to fish for significant amounts of plastic trash, effectively boring you until the quest is complete.

Scrambling For Coin

One of the new additions is the board game Scramblecoin, somewhat similar to chess where you use different pieces based on Disney characters to collect coins. You can play this game with every villager and earn friendship points, but this also allows you to unlock new pieces of other characters. Pieces have distinct movement patterns and entry points, sometimes even a perk, so you have to consider the location of the coins – more will spawn after every turn – and try to collect more than your opponent. There’s some tactical depth to the game and it encourages you to play frequently with the villagers, being a welcome highlight as you shoot to collect all the pieces.

The new Royal Hourglass tool is going to be a source of fun or frustration, eventually both, as you’ll find out soon enough. You can use it to discover relics from ancient times, but the way it works is as a simple compass, pointing you in the direction of treasure. It will be used in various quests but also as a regular tool for frequent loot finding, with treasure reappearing in every location after a few minutes of waiting. This is a good choice as a way to earn Mist in nice amounts, if you can endure the task of running everywhere to find it. Furthermore, you will need the most Mist you can get to unlock new areas.

However, this is where A Rift in Time decided to sneak in a game-breaking bug preventing me to progress in the adventure. A quest asking to collect ancient plates was infinitely stuck at two out of three, after various hours of trying, even returning in different real-life days, and in no way I was able to find the remaining piece. Running around for hours, collecting countless amounts of Mist and resources, but no quest part. As frustration settled in, a quick search revealed that more players stumbled upon this bug, which seems to randomly strike and there’s no noticeable workaround or patch. So, while current impressions for this expansion were positive, this bug completely broke the potential of the game and got me dissatisfied.

A Glitch in Time

Even without considering the progress-halting bug which you may be lucky enough to avoid, A Rift in Time seems to carry a hefty price tag for what it offers in comparison to the base game. The gameplay is very much the same, a cozy but grindy gameplay loop, customization remains enjoyable and possibly the main factor to keep you grinding, and Scramblecoin is an interesting diversion that could get your tactical juices flowing. Fans will appreciate the additional content and disregard the tiresome quests and occasional minor bugs, but when some of them are capable of stopping your progress entirely, it’s hard to say what Jafar truly is up to in this adventure.

Score: 6.5/10

Pros

• More of the same charm of the original
• Scramblecoin is a worthy addition

Cons

• A game-breaking bug on a main quest
• Some quests focus too much on the grind
• Hefty price tag

Disney Dreamlight Valley: A Rift in Time review code was provided by the publisher. You can read MP1st’s review and scoring policy right here.