Dreamy, scene-building games like Tiny Glade and Summerhouse are all vibes

If there were ever a video game I’d like to live in, it’d be developer Pounce Light’s Tiny Glade, a scene-building game where you design castles and gardens straight out of a fairytale. Its muted colors and satisfying sounds only add to the near-perfect atmosphere: You can hear the bricks fall into place as you stack a stonework wall around your wizard’s tower or watch the sheep wander your vast fields. Tiny Glade feels like a mixture of Lego building and painting; with no goals or objectives, Tiny Glade is all vibes.

It’s also part of a growing trend of scene-building games that follow a similar structure, allowing players access to a sandbox full of tools — something more akin to a pile of creative toys than anything else. Over the past several years, there’s been an influx of games that are all atmosphere; the developer puts tools into a player’s hands and then steps back to let them play with it all.

One of the earliest iterations of the scene-builder is Townscaper from Oskar Stålberg, which was released in 2021. The stylized, colorful art is the major draw; from its tools, you can make your own island city. Over the past several years, the Townscaper-like genre has started to grow. Beyond Tiny Glade, which will be released on Sept. 23, there’s Friedemann’s Summerhouse, the lived-in summer vacation builder; Matt Stark’s Tramsterdam, a train system city builder with an Amsterdam-esque atmosphere; Voids Within’s Dysopika, the cyberpunk city sandbox; and KaKaBoBi Studio’s Eaves, an upcoming ancient Chinese village maker. Games like Gourdlets (released on Aug. 15 from AuntyGames) and Minami Lane (released on Feb. 28 from Doot and Bliboop) are a little more involved, adding in a few more interactive simulation elements. Regardless, the theme is the same: Play with the tools. Make whatever you want. And, most importantly, don’t stress it.

Townscaper was a surprise hit when it was released in 2021; Stålberg told U.K. trade publication MCV/Develop that year he’d sold more than 380,000 copies of the game. The next generation of scene-building games seem to be inspired by Townscaper, but they never feel like copies. Each has its own iteration on the concept, and many of them have a bit more complexity to their building mechanics — Tiny Glade lets you carve paths into its countryside, while Summerhouse allows for different varieties of chosen windows and doors. Minami Lane goes a step further, allowing the player inside its buildings (figuratively) to decide what they sell and the prices the stuff is sold for.

Tiny Glade is the epitome of what makes games like these an absolute delight. The beauty of these games’ simplicity is often in the little surprises the world invites you into. As you build, the world shifts and turns. Nature blooms around the cobbled pathways of Tiny Glade, and a dog appears on your stoop in Summerhouse. Depending on the twists and turns of your tram, you might find a bridge in your Tramsterdam scene. It’s a way to encourage curiosity and the delight of asking, what happens when…? What happens when you build a pond in Tiny Glade? There will be ducks, of course. What happens when you pull a line of wooden fences up and around a crumbling tower? You’ll hear the wood clacking against itself as the posts fall into place.

Some of the criticism of this sort of game asks whether they can even be considered games, without any objective or goal. But scene-building games are more than that: They’re toy boxes full of things to play with.