My day job is as a city planner, and I frequently use city building games to live out my wild fantasies where I can actually make a difference in society by smartly planning and developing towns. There is, however, a joy in simply building things without having to worry about the stress that comes with city builder RTS games like Against the Storm or Frostpunk 2. I’ve had my eye on Tiny Glade for a while, because while it is simply a little sandbox to build in, the diorama-like artwork and the simplicity of the UI spoke to me. I’m happy to say this debut game from a team of two developers has exceeded my expectations.
Tiny Glade is quite simple, to the point it gets a bit too minimalistic in some areas. The HUD is beautiful, simple, and requires no tutorial. Simply click “new”, pick a theme, and begin building. Themes change everything from the environment to the time of year to the weather to the vegetation to the color pallet available for your structures. The themes alone provide a lot of variety, and in each build you can change not only the time of day on a 24 hour clock but the orientation of the site to change where the shadows fall. There’s a lot of customization in just the feel of each build, without even getting into what you build.
Loading up a new map starts you with a small randomly generated building to perhaps spark an idea. Or, if you’re like me, you already have an idea, it’s quite simply to erase the existing trees and such in seconds to start with a blank map. One small complaint I have is that I’d like larger glades – while you can still fit an entire (compact) city in one by building up, it’s going to be a challenge to build the kind of large open areas players are wanting. Thankfully there is no build limit on materials, so it’s just dependent on what you can fit into the allotted space. Hopefully it’s on the roadmap! There’s already over 300 suggestions in the official Steam thread and thousands more in the official Discord, so I can only hope Pounce Light Studio is hiring some help from their extremely successful launch.
Tiny Glade features a very intuitive UI and a beautiful HUD; no words appear anywhere on the screen, instead using simple and immediately recognizable symbols. After just 20 minutes in my first build, I felt I had already gotten a good grasp of the controls, and anyone who has played an RTS/management game will find familiar MKB controls for navigation and camera control. Right clicking a building after placing it displays all possibilities for reshaping your structure to any size, dimensions, and angles you please, and once you get into the rhythm of it you’ll find yourself constructing entire small villages in just half an hour. The official Discord is also full of thousands of players offering help, tutorials, and sharing their builds. Check it out!
Tiny Glade not only lets you run wild with your imagination, but it enhances what you are imagining. As you carve out a path in front of a home, for instance, barrels, crates, lamps, and vegetation will appear alongside it as it might look on a house, but different every time. I’m impressed with how intuitive a lot of the building is – with so few buttons on the screen, at first glance it seems very limited. Playing with the game for just a few minutes will show you it is anything but.
For instance, you want stairs? Flatten a building, draw a path to it, boom, stairs. You want a bridge? Create a river, flatten a building, raise the bottom of the building, add railings. You want a floating building? Don’t worry, stacking structures and then removing them can get you straight into the sky! If i sat here and listed every amazing thing Tiny Glade does by plugging into your intuition, we’d be here for hours.
If you’re the kind of person that likes a little structure in their sandbox, each day Pounce Light has a Daily Challenge for you. It’s as simple as “Moon Temple” or “Wizard School”, but it really does get the creative juices flowing. After finishing your Daily Challenge, you’re guided to the Discord which has a channel for you to showcase your build, vote on which others you like, and get inspiration for your projects. It’s a bit unorthodox way of building a community, but it seems to be working so far.
I’d like an official way to vote on my favorite build for the day, and for the best rated build to get showcased in the game the next day! I have seen some folks using it to build out maps for Dungeons and Dragons, which I tried as well this week. The fully explorable 3D map of the haunted Abbey was well received by my players and really added to the immersion!
I have very few criticisms thus far with Tiny Glade. I would love a few more decorations, for instance, and the ability to build windmills/waterwheels as well as a larger build area. I’d like to be able to make arched bridges, as well as have access to wood buildings in addition to the stone ones. There’s already an extremely robust photo mode, one of the best ever, but I’d like to see a run button while in first person view to get around my huge maps. I also desperately need a copy/paste function, which I’ve heard is on the way. I would like a way to name my glades as well, as right now they are saved only as images you have to sort through. There are some folks in the Discord already working on mods as well, so I’ll have to see how that comes into play, but it seems like it could make an already excellent game an all-timer.
I recommend Tiny Glade for any lovers of cozy games, city builders, sandbox games, or playing with LEGOs. It’s beautiful, chill, and full of heart. It does exactly what it needs to, and is so smartly designed it seems to predict what you are trying to do while you’re figuring it out yourself. I can tell I will be spending many more hours building these beautiful diorama worlds. Can we build it? Yes we can!
Nirav played Tiny Glade on PC with his own bought copy.
