Tiny Glade's castle-doodling demo is packed with delightful little reactive surprises

pcgamer.com:

There has been a lot of anticipation for Tiny Glade in the cozy gaming circles I follow. Its an adorable little building toy inspired by the success of Townscaper but has you build idyllic little castles instead of seaside cities. After getting to spend some time with its upcoming demo, I am hurting to play with the rest of it.

As in Townscaper, Tiny Glade's premise is that your builds are all reactive. If you draw a little dirt footpath up to your cozy curtain wall it will sprout an archway. Widen that path and your single archway will split into two. Windows placed together may spawn shutters while dragging a circular tower close to your other buildings will have them mesh together as if they'd always been there.

In the demo I can doodle a stone wall in any shape I please and watch it snake into existence or slither out if I hit the undo button. I can drop in circle towers or square buildings, shown as little wood frame previews while I decide on their size. There are windows, hanging lights, a brush for placing shrubs and flowers. There's even a terrain height tool and a photo mode to play around with.

Tiny Glade immediately feels so touchable. The grass of my glade parts around my cursor before I've even drawn anything. Mousing over a wall I've drawn will spawn a little white line reminding me of its full shape even if part of it's hidden behind a building. Every building or tower I hover over makes a satisfying plip plop noise and offers me a draggable arrow to resize or rotate it.

I love how its day and night system just ticks away in the background but doesn't have any consequences for my building other than a change in lighting as I work. I discovered that dragging the height of my stone wall shorter than the arch it needed to accommodate the path through it would produce this funny little minimalist archway. I fiddled with the exact size of a little dirt path approaching one of my plaster buildings, watching its Hobbit-size wood door slowly grow to human