Several of us at Aftermath are fans of building games that just let you build, without all the rules and fail states of other city-builders. (Though we like those too, or at least when they work.) Upcoming indie game Tiny Glade is the latest in the “just make a cool house” genre. It has a demo out later today on Steam, and it’s lovely.
In Tiny Glade, by developer Pounce Light, you build little medieval towns atop grassy landscapes, dragging to add houses, towers, and walls. That’s the whole deal! The demo only features one contained area to build, and while I felt a bit stifled by the limited space at first, there’s so much you can do in a small area. If you drag a building horizontally or vertically, it will get taller, longer, shorter, or skinnier; as it does so, it transforms itself, sprouting arches and other decorative touches. You can combine buildings to make entire complicated castles, and you can add windows and doors, change the shape of roofs or the color of bricks, and add some pathways and–my personal favorite–clusters of wildflowers.
While there aren’t a lot of variation options in the demo’s menu, you can create so many different things just by clicking and dragging around. Building games like Summerhouse are fun in part because they let you make exactly what you want, but I really enjoyed going with the flow in Tiny Glade, discovering what the game would give me as I dragged my mouse or tweaked the landscape up and down. A tower going from a pointed roof to a flat turret inspired me to create a fortress; a couple skinny buildings clumping together transformed my town into a grand estate.
My favorite part of the demo is the sound: the rumbling bricks of walls unfurling, the rattle of windows going in, the rustle of a flowerbed expanding. Sound designer Martin Kvale worked on similar chill builder Townscaper, among other games (and, full disclosure, also once showed me around Oslo when I visited Norway on a birthday trip in 2019). The attention to detail, both in the sound and the visuals, make Tiny Glade feel lively and robust; it might not be complex, but it feels full, from changing times of day to wandering sheep that react if you click on them or build where they’re standing.
The Tiny Glade demo will be available for a few weeks, and will overlap with an incoming Steam Next Fest that’s sure to overwhelm me with even more demos to play. The full game is due to release some time this year.
