Tiny Glade Review

ign.com:

Playing Tiny Glade – the latest cozy game to offer us all an escape from the dumpster fire purgatory that is modern life – for the first time is like sitting down with some building blocks and falling into a hypnotic trance. One minute you’re just adding a tower and some windows to an old house, and suddenly you look up and you’ve spent two hours building a sprawling village with ponds and crooked paths, your screenshots folder is bursting with images of your little masterpiece at dusk and dawn, and your back hurts because you never did get a proper chair for your home office. Its biggest flaw is that, as the name implies, there just isn't enough of it.

To say I was “playing Tiny Glade” arguably isn’t even accurate. It’s more like I was playing with it. You could call it a building sim, but it’s more like a set of enchanted Lego bricks, or a much prettier Minecraft creative mode. You get a blank canvas of terrain and a small set of tools to build some houses, place water and plants, take photos, and… well, that’s it. So if building freely and setting your own goals are not enough to keep your attention, know that Tiny Glade is not going to throw any armies of orcs at your scenic battlements, and no one actually lives here.

It’s also a shallow pond rather than a deep ocean of content, but it does make the most of what it has. As someone who has built a million dysfunctional settlements for games, at first I cocked an eyebrow at the limited customization options on offer. Towers and buildings, plants, ponds, and paths didn't seem like enough to keep me busy, but as I experimented the limitations let my brain forget about building something specific because the tools take care of details thoughtfully and delightfully. Dragging a path right up to a building meant a door popped up on the front; Placing windows next to each other changed them from a simple pane to a wide bay window. Ducks arrived at the pond I had made and sheep wandered through the open areas and then, at