After becoming the most wishlisted cozy game on Steam before its launch, castle doodling game Tiny Glade has flooded all my social feeds with everything from adorable hamlets to sprawling cities. There's a lot of joy in this little toy for players like me who love nothing more than spending hours fiddling with the particulars of a build. Unlike so many other games with building systems that just shove a set of tools in your hands, Tiny Glade actively wants to play with you. Discovering all the quirks of its procedural building system is the real endgame.
If you've somehow missed Tiny Glade entirely, it's a building game with no win or lose state—just creativity. More importantly, it's a small set of tools: paths, walls, windows, lights, that all react and change as you build with them. Drawing a path up to a wall creates an archway in that wall. Drawing a path over a small body of water turns that path into a bridge. A window placed at ground level on a building becomes a door, and so on.
I've only spent five hours with it since launch and though I imagine it will run out of tricks at some point, I can tell I'm still very far from seeing all the possibilities. Like putting two gabled roofs together and seeing a bird nest cuddle in the crook. Or snapping together multiple windows until they grow into a bigger, beautiful wrought iron window.
The phenomenon Tiny Glade is riding began with Townscaper a few years ago, which delighted everyone with a similar toy-like procedural building system, though it was intentionally more restrained and didn't have multiple tools to use. I'm continually impressed with Tiny Glade because it does so much more than the other building toys like it. It covers so many more possibilities, edge cases, and little delights than Townscaper did and does a lot more than some of its contemporaries like Monterona or Dystopika too.
Tiny Glade adapts to what you're building so flawlessly that it's easy to underestimate just how ambitious a technical feat it is. It lets me freeform doodle walls in any shape I want and then snip apart or edit the individual vertices of those walls. It crams in an incredible amount of control without ever overwhelming me.
What I enjoy most about Tiny Glade though, is how quietly collaborative it feels. As I play I feel like I'm in silent conversation with the developers as I try new tricks and am delighted when something I want to try is accounted for like dragging the top of a door into a giant entryway fit for a stable. I'm reminded of the incredible things that MMO players can do with a building system like the absolute maverick house builders in The Elder Scrolls Online. Where TESO's builders create marvelous builds almost as an act of spite and defiance, pushing a building system past any use case the developers envisioned, Tiny Glade feels like it's working with me.
That's not to say that the same building geniuses aren't also cooking up unexpected uses for objects in Tiny Glade. I've already seen at least one tutorial for creating a picnic table out of fence posts and I know that's not the last wild trick I'll see. I've tried to stay away from too many video tutorials so that I can continue having these organic discoveries, because that moment of delight when I realize I was on the same page as its creators continues to enchant me.
