Tiny Glade won’t stop delighting me with new discoveries

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.