Tiny Glade has been a constant presence on TikTok for the past year. It’s never far away. In between burrito recipes and hymns to the Fujifilm X100v, this gorgeous toy-like art medium transforms balmy meadows into half-ruined castles, half-ruined villages, and half-ruined forts.
Dreamy and slightly eerie, it also conjures up words like “enchanting” and “mesmerizing” in the comments section. It makes sense, really. Tiny Glade is a game about making rustic dioramas and then photographing them. It’s easy to imagine a magical exile living here among the rocks, reeds and wild heather.
I feel like we've been here before – sort of. It's only recently (I just checked, it's March) that I've been swept up in Summerhouse, another toy-like thing about making beautiful, almost abandoned buildings. Summerhouse is still my favorite, and I think Tiny Glade is right up there with them. But I also think there's plenty of room for two of these things so quickly, especially when they're so different and provide such joy and interest in such different ways.
The big difference with Tiny Glade is that it’s 3D. You’re given a small plot of land and can move the camera around as you build round towers and squat, angular buildings, and construct walls, fences, and paths. You can also move the ground, removing rocks or even cliffs from the ground, or pushing the soil down to find rivers and lakes waiting there. Then you can zoom in, pull it back a lot, or tilt the camera all around to get the most stunning angle. You can even see what you’re building from above, like a relaxed Moholy-Nagy.
All of which brings me to the second big difference, and perhaps the most important one. Summerhouse was all about unlocking new elements: new windows and doors, air conditioning units with cats sitting on them, giant graffiti. Not only does Tiny Glade keep us in that friendly historical period known as “old,” it doesn't just constantly introduce you to new individual pieces and parts, but rather contextually warps what you already have depending on how you use them. Build a tower, and then you can push and pull it with the mouse to make it taller or shorter, thicker or thinner. Move two panes of glass close together, and the game can turn them into a large arched window. Flatten the roof of a hall enough, and the game will interpret your request and replace the roof with battlements. Draw a path through a building, and the game will kindly add a door.
These things actually get to the heart of what's special here. Tiny Glade, like all the best Grand Designs, reveals that architecture always requires a bit of negotiation. In this case, I'll place something, and then the game will sometimes choose how to decorate it. “Wouldn't a pile of wood look nice next to that wall?” it wonders. Then I'll move the wall a few inches, and the game will decide I've ruined everything and grumpily trash the wood altogether. But then it'll instantly come back with a new idea: “Maybe a porch would look nicer instead?”
So I build buildings, and the game often makes little micro-adjustments and refinements in real time. It's what gives Tiny Glade its beautiful, rattling, wiggly feel. Even stretching a wall across a field is a moment of genuine wonder here, because even as the wall arches and curves and bends beneath my mouse pointer, everything is constantly shifting in other ways, forever readjusting to its new overall length. Bricks pop out of place, stones crumble and fall apart, the overall form I've built morphs.
And that's just a wall. Scale that up to a tower and you have a design tool that really feels like it has playful gremlins rolling around in it. Put together a castle and when you look back at what you've done, you can see a bunch of little things that you didn't specifically include, but they're all so weird and insignificant that there's still no doubt that you're a writer.
Ah, the playfulness. It's in the seasons, with a wide range to choose from, including rosy autumns and golden summers. It's in the way it brings that oily sheen of fresh ice to rivers in winter, and it's in the way that if you remove the land where a grazing sheep has previously been placed by a game animal, the sheep will pick up a little balloon or umbrella to keep it aloft and its feet out of the mud.
But there’s clarity too. The tools are all easy to understand, based on their icons at the bottom of the screen, and when there are options – building cladding, for example, or different rock colours – they appear in logical submenus radials and are easy to navigate. The camera mode is an absolute treat too, letting you fiddle with vignetting and aperture, and not just choose a focus point, but also dimension of focus. I think Moholy-Nagy would have been impressed. I spent as much time doing camera work as I did building silly little towns.
Comfort is a preference, but Tiny Glade initially reminded me of an old Ford quote about the Model T—you know, the fact that the car could come in any color you wanted, as long as it was black. For my first few hours, I was worried that the Tiny Glade would be any kind of landscape as long as it was twee. But the more I played, the more I became convinced that wasn’t really true. My personal limits are tweeness, but I tend to believe that’s more me than the game. In other words, I can’t wait to see what real talent does with this beautiful thing.
This review is based on the game review structure provided by the publisher.