Help, I’m completely mesmerized by this relaxing castle-building sandbox
Tiny Glade is an enchanting little sandbox that lets you effortlessly build towers, walls, and fences, and even pet the little sheep.
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You’ve probably seen a few gifs ofTiny Gladeat some point over the past year onTwitterorTikTok(though I’m not sure it had a name or Steam page until recently). Do you remember short clips of someone moving a mouse over green pasture and effortlessly drawing wooden fences, stone walls, castle towers and pointed rooftops, and then click-and-dragging to make little adjustments and tweaks and thinking “Oh my gosh, that looks divine.”
That was probably Tiny Glade, which feels similar to games like Townscaper: a completely relaxing sandbox with no goals or objectives where you basically paint beautiful little castles in a lush green world. Get mesmerized by the trailer above, which was revealed at the Wholesome Snack presentation before the Game Awards today.
I love the way the world reacts to your movements, the stone walls and fences almost feeling alive with how fluidly they spring up, shrink down, and reshape themselves under the mouse pointer. Click and drag and you can pull a chunky stone wall across the meadow. Click the ground and a dirt path appears, and if you drag that path into the wall an archway will be formed to let the path pass through. Pull the path through a shorter wall and a wooden gate will appear as if by magic. It just looks so dang good.
And while you’re drawing paths, keep an eye on that stone wall you just built. You’ll see leafy green vines slowly growing up and over it. Is there a chubby little sheep wandering around nearby? Take a break from your castle to give it a pat. Delightful.
Tiny Glade is the work ofPounce Light, a two-person development team. Here’sTiny Glade’s Steam pageto anxiously camp while you await a release date.
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Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he’d stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He’s also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.
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