TINY GLADE is a cozy, sandbox building game where players can construct fantasy castles, ancient ruins, medieval inns, fairy villages and more. Developed by Swedish indie studio Pounce Light and released in September 2024 for Windows.
My friend Herman bought this game for me when it came out but I couldn’t play it until now because the devs just added controller support. I never use a mouse because it gives me shoulder pain. Even when I’m not gaming, I have to use the touchpad on my laptop, so I’m so glad I could finally give TINY GLADE a try.
TINY GLADE has beautiful music, visuals and sound design. I love the way I can shrink, enlarge, raise, lower, move, color and design towers and walls. It feels magical.
But, unfortunately, with a controller, the camera and builidng mechanics are very awkward and frustrating. There’s nothing much in the way of tutorial to explain how anything works, so there’s a lot of fiddly trial and error. Which is not what you want in a “cozy” relaxing game. I spent over an hour just trying to figure out the basics and adjusting my settings.
It sure makes adorable pictures, though, thanks to the in-game camera. Once I started to get the hang of the controls, castle construction was a lot of fun. This would be a really cool way for a DM to create images for their next Dungeons & Dragons campaign.
I wanted to go into TINY GLADE without any preconceived notions or expectations, so I didn’t watch any tutorials or build videos on YouTube before playing. But I highly recommend you do, if you plan to play it yourself. Now that I’ve tried it out, I’ve watched several and they are really amazing.
TINY GLADE could fast become a game that takes over my life, if I let it.
I found conflicting information about an ESRB rating for TINY GLADE, with some sites saying it was E for everyone and others saying it was T for teens 13+. I don’t think there’s anything inappropriate in this game but younger children might find the castle construction mechanics too difficult.
The game costs US$14.99 on Steam for PC and Linux.
~ J.L. Hilton
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