Every once in a while, I find a new “relaxation game”. There’s no real genre to what I call a relaxation game, it’s just a game that lets me, well, relax. They can be puzzle games, city builders, farming games; basically anything that lets me sit back for a while. I’ve recently bumped into a new one, one that might have first place relaxation for a long time: Tiny Glade.

Tiny Glade is a both a small game and a large game. It’s what it says on the box, taking place in a glade. That’s tiny. In the glade you get to build a stone-structured medieval building, or set of buildings, and you don’t have a whole lot of space to do it. In each direction you probably have the space of about three average-sized houses to work with. It’s not a city builder, it’s not even a town builder. It’s a town square builder.

And the fact that it’s so small is actually what makes it so big. When you have so little space to work with, you have to work closely with everything. Not always, of course, sometimes I just want to spend twenty minutes plopping some walls together. But fairly often, I want to not just build something, I want to create something. I want to have what’s going on in my glade be art, a story. That’s actually what happened the first time I played. I was just sticking stuff together to figure out the game, and it blossomed into something way bigger. I actually didn’t think I would continue with it, but as I stuck more parts on to my building, a story started forming in my mind. And as that story started growing, my creation started growing. Each became a foundation of the other, and fuel for the other. That’s…kind of nerdy, I know, but it’s truly how I feel about the game. So sit back, take a look at my first creation, hear how it came to be, and then try out the game. If you want to relax, I’m sure you’ll like it.

Above is my very first creation in Tiny Glade. Before I get into the story, I’ll just say that this game has an amazing photo-taking system, that sticks the images right into the Steam screenshot system. Anyways, this is the home, the castle, of a nobleman. I’m going to get a bit historically nerdy on you, but do you know how expensive castles were? Like, when we see castles in fiction, even the smallest ones are huge, but a castle was basically just a defensive stone building, and could even have just been a one-roomed box. That’s a bit under-playing it, but there certainly weren’t Hogwarts everywhere. Anyways, point is, this is a decent-sized castle. I never actually decided who was living there, but I had come to the conclusion that it was a fairly powerful big count or a fairly small duke. Let’s just say Duke Carr of House Nyuli. He was very prideful of his country, which is why there are three banners on his bedroom wall, plus more that you can’t see from this angle. He was also very rich. This place is about three stories high, but that’s not what shows his wealth. There are nineteen lamps on the castle, plus one along the path leading up to the servants’ shack. There’s one one the shack, but they have to pay for it themselves, and it’s filled with stinky, smokey tallow. Seriously, look up how expensive candles were before the invention of artificial wax. This castle of mine has lamps by literally ever window and door except the ones above the pond, and…those ones at the edge of the patio on the support building I stuck in last minute after realizing my bedroom would probably collapse.

The servants light them, of course, no matter how hard some of them are to get a ladder to (I did say I was nice enough not to put any over water). They light the lamps, they water the flowers, they feed the ducks and the sheep. Ducks and sheep that are nothing but pets. I don’t eat their eggs, I don’t eat their meat, I don’t use there wool. I simply use my wealth to keep them fed while I sit next to my pond and drink my wine. After the servants are done their daily tasks, they’ll head home to their shack. I actually wanted their house to be wattle and hay, but the game is just stone. Oh well. Their home is through a doorway in a fairly high wall, one that stretches from one edge of the glade to the other. I can’t have those poors corrupting me! Ick. Inside their home it is only a single room. That L-shape sections it off a bit, but there are no additional walls inside. Anything that would block the movement of heat is no good. Past the entryway where things are stored, they have everything together. The fireplace is for both heating and cooking, and numerous beds are nearby. It’s hard to see in the darkness, but all their windows are just slits in the wall, I’m not paying extra for glass that I’m not going to use.

Duke Carr is kind of an jackass, isn’t he? But this is what I mean when I say Tiny Glade is a story builder, an art maker. Most–like, nearly two thirds up to this point–of my review is just a story. A story of someone in just a single castle. And not only did that story build the castle, but that castle built the story. I’ve always liked telling stories and making art, but my skill in the latter is a bit lacking on paper. I love Tiny Glade because it give me a new medium to create art and to tell stories. It’s really something I think you should try out if you haven’t already. Even if you just watch a let’s play, even if you just look at screenshots, I think you’ll enjoy it. You’ll simply be looking at someone else’s art. If you don’t want to paint, why not go to a museum?

How about you, have you played Tiny Glade yet? What do you think about it? Be sure to tell us, and show us some of your creations on Facebook!