Playing Tiny Glade – the latest cozy game to offer us all an escape from the dumpster fire purgatory that is modern life – for the first time is like sitting down with some building blocks and falling into a hypnotic trance. One minute you’re just adding a tower and some windows to an old house, and suddenly you look up and you’ve spent two hours building a sprawling village with ponds and crooked paths, your screenshots folder is bursting with images of your little masterpiece at dusk and dawn, and your back hurts because you never did get a proper chair for your home office. Its biggest flaw is that, as the name implies, there just isn't enough of it.
To say I was “playing Tiny Glade” arguably isn’t even accurate. It’s more like I was playing with it. You could call it a building sim, but it’s more like a set of enchanted Lego bricks, or a much prettier Minecraft creative mode. You get a blank canvas of terrain and a small set of tools to build some houses, place water and plants, take photos, and… well, that’s it. So if building freely and setting your own goals are not enough to keep your attention, know that Tiny Glade is not going to throw any armies of orcs at your scenic battlements, and no one actually lives here.
It’s also a shallow pond rather than a deep ocean of content, but it does make the most of what it has. As someone who has built a million dysfunctional settlements for games, at first I cocked an eyebrow at the limited customization options on offer. Towers and buildings, plants, ponds, and paths didn't seem like enough to keep me busy, but as I experimented the limitations let my brain forget about building something specific because the tools take care of details thoughtfully and delightfully. Dragging a path right up to a building meant a door popped up on the front; Placing windows next to each other changed them from a simple pane to a wide bay window. Ducks arrived at the pond I had made and sheep wandered through the open areas and then, at night, the little lamps I had placed gave off a soft glow. It's almost meditative, seeing tiny changes in the environment affect your creation, safe in the knowledge there's no better or “best” way to do it, or anything you can put in place can't be taken away again with a quick click of the mouse. Doctors could probably prescribe it as part of anger management treatments - who can be mad when they're busy placing happy little trees?
That's the sweet spot for Tiny Glade: a small slice of flow state to pamper your brain and make the real world seem very far away.
“
Unfortunately, after a few building sessions, it felt like Tiny Glade had run out of surprises. The delightful procedurally generated details that were added as I built were feeling repetitive, and making a house blue or green or tall or small or built entirely over water – imagine the black mold – lost its charm. The same restrictions that allow everything to fit together so smoothly also mean that more creative types who want to experiment are going to have a very limited set of parameters to do that in. Building in different seasons, moving the clock forward to watch the lights come on in the windows, all of those tweaks can only maintain the thrill for so long. Covering a house all in lamps? Who cares, when you and your Steam screenshot folder are the only ones who will ever even notice, aside from the aforementioned sheep.
There is at least a theme of the day that offers the gentlest of suggestions, setting a vibe and starting you off with a small hamlet for you to adapt. However, you're not getting graded on your work, so after a while the novelty of direction erodes like bad masonry. That said, after a few days’ break I was back again, using it as the equivalent of a cerebral fidget toy in between cutting Tyranids in half. That's the sweet spot for Tiny Glade: a small slice of flow state to pamper your brain and make the real world seem very far away.
Of course, on the internet the rule for anything is “pics or it didn't happen,” and Tiny Glade has met that challenge with a peachy-keen screenshot mode. It even has a first-person mode so you can explore your creation on foot, and see just how wrong you got the angles on that particular bit of garden wall from the perspective of a flying ghostly architect. I can absolutely see a world where hardcore fans trade screenshots, gently compete to out-cute each other, but I'll be keeping my adorable creations to myself, thank you very much. Still, having a way to preserve and play in the little sets I created is a nice touch, and I hope other games steal the screenshot toolset immediately for its clever mix of control and simplicity.
Everything that's in Tiny Glade is a little spoonful of joy, from sheep to walled-in gardens to creating tall towers with a Rapunzel vibe, but it's a gaming snack. Go in expecting dozens of hours of gameplay and you'll burn through it after a few hours and call it a day. See it as an art package that you'll bring up when a creative mood strikes and you'll find a magical little toolset to get lost in. It may be small in stature, but Tiny Glade will live forever in my Steam library, ready to use its coziness to quell the darkness that lurks within my very soul.
