Tiny Glade has been a fixture on TikTok for about a year now. It’s never far away. Between burrito recipes and Fujifilm X100v anthems, this gorgeous, toy-like art tool gamely transforms stretches of rolling meadow into half-ruined castles, half-ruined villages, and half-ruined citadels.
Dreamy and slightly haunted, words like “charming” and “enchanting” are also thrown around in the comments section. It really makes sense. Tiny Glade is a game about creating rustic dioramas and then photographing them. It’s simple to imagine some exiled magical person living here among the rocks, reeds and wild heather.
I feel like we’ve been here before—sort of. It wasn’t until recently (I just checked, it was March) that I got sucked into Summerhouse, another toy about creating pretty, almost abandoned buildings. Summerhouse remains my favorite, and I think Tiny Glade is a close second. But I also think there’s more than enough room for two of these gadgets in such quick succession, especially when they’re so different, and when they’re so different in their delights and appeals.
The biggest difference in Tiny Glade is that it’s 3D. You’re given a cozy little piece of land and you can move the camera around, creating round towers and squat, angular buildings, and laying down walls, fences, and paths. You can also move the earth, pulling rocks and even cliffs out of the ground or pushing soil down to find rivers and lakes waiting there. Then you can zoom in, zoom out, tilt it around to find the most charming angle. You can even view what you’ve built from above, like in the cozy Moholy-Nagy.
All of which brings me to the second gigantic difference, and perhaps the most critical. Summerhouse was all about unlocking fresh stuff: fresh windows and doors, air conditioners with cats sitting on them, huge graffiti. Tiny Glade doesn’t just keep us firmly in the cordial historical period known as “then” by giving us a constant stream of fresh individual pieces and bits, it contextually twists the stuff you already have, depending on how you apply it. Plant a tower, and then you can push and pull it with your mouse to make it taller or shorter, thicker or thinner. Cut two panes of glass close together, and the game can turn them into a vast arched window. Flatten the roof of a hall enough, and the game interprets your will and turns the roof into battlements. Draw a path through a building, and the game obligingly adds a door.
This really gets to the heart of what’s special about Tiny Glade, like all the best Big projectsreveals that architecture is always a bit of a negotiation. In this case, I place something, and then the game sometimes chooses how to decorate it. “Wouldn’t a pile of wood look good against this wall,” it seems to think. Then I move the wall a few inches, and the game decides I’ve ruined everything, and irritably gets rid of the wood entirely. But then it immediately comes back with a fresh idea: “Maybe a log cabin would look nicer instead?”
So I build buildings, and the game often makes petite micro-adjustments and finesse in real time. This is what gives Tiny Glade its wonderful, rattling, restless character. Just stretching a wall across the field is a real moment of delight, because even as the wall bends and flexes and flexes under my mouse pointer, the whole thing is constantly changing in other ways, constantly adjusting to its fresh overall length. Bricks pop in and out of place, rocks crumble and fall apart as the overall form I’m creating changes.
And that’s just a wall. Expand it to a tower and you have a design tool that really does feel like there are comical gremlins crawling around inside. Assemble a castle and when you look back on what you’ve done, you can see a lot of little things that you didn’t add on purpose, but they’re all so whimsical and petty that there’s no doubt you’re still the author.
Oh, the hilarity. It’s in the seasons, which come in a wide range from which you can choose, including rosy autumns and golden summers. It’s in the way winter brings that greasy sheen of fresh ice to the rivers, and the way that, if you clear away the ground where game has already placed a sheep grazing, the sheep gets a little balloon or umbrella to keep it up and its feet out of the mud.
But there’s also clarity. All the tools are simple to understand with icons at the bottom of the screen, and when options are available—building cladding or different stone colors, for example—they appear in sensible radial submenus and are simple to navigate. Camera mode is also a real treat, letting you play with vignetting and aperture, and not only choose the focus point but also choose size focal point. Moholy-Nagy would be impressed, I think. I spent as much time playing with the camera as I did building stupid little towns.
Coziness is a matter of choice, though, and Tiny Glade initially reminded me of Ford’s ancient quote about the Model T – you know, the fact that the car was available in any color, as long as it was black. For the first few hours, I worried that Tiny Glade offered any view, as long as it was cloyingly sweet. But the more I play, the more I’m convinced that’s not true. My personal limitations are cloyingly sweet, but I’m willing to believe that’s me, not the game. In other words, I can’t wait to see what real talent does with this pretty thing.
This review is based on a test version of the game provided by the publisher.
