In the cozy gaming circles that I follow, there's a lot of anticipation for Tiny Glade. It's an adorable little building toy inspired by the success of Townscaper, but instead of a seaside city it builds an idyllic little castle. After getting to spend some time with its upcoming demo, I'm hurt to play with the rest of it.

As with Townscaper, the premise of Tiny Glade is that all builds are reactive. Draw a little dirty walkway up to your cozy curtain wall and the archway will sprout. Spread that path and your single archway will be split in two. While dragging a circular tower near your other building, the windows placed together Messi them together as if they were always there

In the demo, I doodled a stone wall in any shape I please and saw a snake in it present or I could slither out with pressing the undo button. I can drop them into a circular tower or a square building, shown as a preview of a small wooden frame while determining their size. There are windows, hanging lights, brushes for placing shrubs and flowers. There is also a photo mode to play with the terrain height tool.

A small vacant lot immediately feels so touching. The grass in my glade is divided around my cursor before I draw anything. When I hover my mouse over the wall I drew, it produces a small white line that reminds me of its full shape, even if some of it is hidden behind the building. Every building or tower I put on makes a satisfying plip plop noise and offers me a draggable arrow to resize or rotate it.

I love how that day and night system just ticks away in the background but doesn't have any results for my building other than lighting changes as I work. When I drag the height of my stone wall shorter than the arch needed to accommodate the path through it, it produces this funny little minimalist arch I see a hobbit-sized wooden door slowly growing to human height and plumbing the procedural generated garden tools as it grows into a double door. Tinkering with the exact size of a small dirt road approaching 1 of my plaster buildings. And I have just now discovered that lowering the roof line all the way down makes a small rooftop courtyard. I need to go to make more of them right away.

I continue to be distracted by all its details. It's not as minimalist as Townscaper, and you can only spawn and remove structures and change colors in each of the cube-like spaces. Tiny Glade has far more toolbars by comparison, and it's even more intriguing to learn all its little quirks and rules than Townscaper.

Now all I want more from Tiny Glade is the rest of it. In the demo, I'm limited to a fairly small buildable area in that sunny vacant lot environment. Its developer Pounce Light shows that more biomes will be fully released, like snow-covered trees, autumn forests, and much larger constructible areas. I'm sure everyone will start replicating all their favorite castles in history and fiction, so it will be very interesting to see how it expands.

Tiny Glade is expected to launch in 2024, but a release date has not yet been set. That demo will be streamed live on Steam on Thursday 5/30 and will pass Steam Next Fest, which ends on 6/17.