Tiny Glade is all about making ruins

Tiny Glade is a building game, or a building toy. But you don’t need to actually build anything to see how magical it all is. Instead, you can just take the cursor and move it through a patch of wild flowers. Don’t click. Don’t select. Don’t release a twisting rattlesnake of stone wall or a squat, pointed tower. Just watch as the cursor itself, as its physical presence in the world, prods the wild flowers around, ruffles them, gently reorients their petals and stems.

Stone walls, pointed towers, wild flowers: as these items suggest, Tiny Glade is a game for making pretty little bucolic ruins. You can make a little citadel, with a wall surrounding a central keep and courtyards and battlements and windows to serenade lovers from, but the moment your cursor leaves the screen it will be clear that what you’ve built is old and rundown and pleasantly forgotten.

Windowframes pop into the world sagging. Those walls, which shudder and click as you place them, always come with stones that have settled out of line, with the hint of missing masonry. The towers can be tall and strong, but there’s something about the wood used in the roof, the potential for cracks, that would make a prospective repairman pause under a doorframe, look up, and whisper, “You’re sure you want to stay here?” Tiny Glade trades in gorgeous disrepair.

The current Steam Next Fest demo offers a lovely taste of the wider game, holding back a few tools and marking off much of the map, but still giving you a lillypond’s worth of space to put together a little tumbledown house and an overrunning garden. The game is full of surprises, too: a tool with a hard-to-parse symbol turns out to be a kind of mountain creator, pulling rock from the ground with a chummy rumble. A tool-tip will suggest that you make a wall, right, and then guide a path through it.

Tiny Glade has been a pocket-sized superstar on TikTok for what seems like an age, and playing the demo only makes it clearer how special this is. You can make something unique and characterful very easily here, with controls that seem to interpret your desires so effortlessly that it’s actually quite hard to remember what you did: how did you know that specific dragging motion would widen the boundary of a tower? Why did you trust the window to turn into a door when placed at ground level?

There is a vogue at the moment – well, two games, a mini-vogue – for building toys that create old stuff rather than new stuff. Tiny Glade and Summerhouse are both for crafting things which feel like they’ve had their own lives long before you plucked them into existence. If you like ruins, and beauty, and old walls, and wild flowers, this might be the game for you. In fact, it’s quite hard to think of someone who wouldn’t like it.