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.) Indie game Tiny Glade is the latest in the “just make a cool house” genre. It’s out today, and it’s lovely.
This article originally appeared on 5/30/24 and focused on impressions of the Tiny Glade demo. We’ve updated it today for the game’s full release, adding new information and removing mention of the demo.
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! There are different levels to build on, featuring different seasons, but each one gives you a small buildable space flanked by trees. 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 or rising up on brick stilts. You can combine buildings to make entire complicated castles, and you can add windows and banners and doors, change the shape of roofs or the color of bricks, and add some pathways and–my personal favorite–ponds and clusters of wildflowers. You can change the time of day and the direction of shadows, which is great for seeing how your buildings will look all lit up.
The space constraints and handful of customization options might make you feel a bit limited, but 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 game 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 the passage of time to wandering sheep that react if you click on them or build where they’re standing.
Tiny Glade is less about building and more about tinkering: plopping down a few buildings and a nice little pond, then poking and prodding to see what you can turn it into. Daily themes might spark your thinking; today’s, “Castle on a Cliff,” starts with some buildings on rocks overlooking a pond. There are also robust screenshot tools to play with, including a first-person camera mode that lets you wander around your creation.
Tiny Glade felt the most engaging to me when I imagined it like a piece of paper I was doodling on, not focusing so much on the outcome as my mental state while playing around. The other building game I’m playing these days is Frostpunk 2, and Tiny Glade is serving as a nice antidote to that game’s brutality. It’s delightful to just mess around with, letting my quaint little structures tell their own story.
