Tiny Village is a gorgeous pixel incremental game that brings the upgrade tree to life

I'm always on the lookout for a new incremental game to get obsessed over. I've become something of a fiend for the genre, and there's nothing I love more than the sense of accomplishment I feel upon seeing a rapidly expanding upgrade tree. Tiny Village by Elpoco scratches the itch, but it also goes so much further. 

Tiny Village is a pixel farming incremental game in which you mine for resources and spend them on upgrades to make resource gathering easier. However, this game takes the upgrade tree and turns it into an entire village for you to expand as you play, and the growth is addictive. 

A living, breathing upgrade tree

Incremental games are, by design, addictive to those who enjoy them. That constant sense of improvement is a dopamine hit like no other, because where else do you get so much better at something in such a short space of time? The slow start is quickly forgotten once you start unlocking upgrades to speed and damage, until eventually you feel invincible.

Tiny Village takes that most basic incremental gameplay loop but adds something I've never encountered before. Instead of an upgrade screen filled with nodes and lines, each upgrade option is a building or landmark within a town. Upgrading something always adds something to the town, like new buildings, people, or decorations. 

The introduction of this new (to me) secondary objective makes Tiny Village feel so much more satisfying to progress through. You're not just getting faster and stronger in the main game, but you're also expanding the town and bringing it to life in a way that feels completely tangible. You can choose to make the nodes visual, but it does somewhat take away from the cutesy feel the upgrade menu otherwise provides.

Progression or decoration?

This does, however, lead to some questionable choices. Sure, upgrading your damage via the outhouse might seem like the best use of your resources, but what about the water tower in the south that will gradually add decoration to its otherwise sparse surroundings? You have to make choices, and mine have not necessarily been logical while playing the demo. Still, it's been worth the slower progression for the sake of a prettier town. 

There's a touch of cozy farming sim to proceedings in Tiny Village, if you ignore the fact that there is no farming. The art style and the setting seem like something that would be right at home among today's myriad of farming sims, although I'm counting my blessings that there are no tedious relationship-building or life-sim elements involved.  

Still, the theme and style of Tiny Village perfectly lend themselves to the type of progression an incremental game usually brings, and it's a combination I've fallen in love with. I care about the village, perhaps more than I care about my actual progression, which is a lovely change from the norm. 

Speaking of blessings

As if Tiny Village wasn't already offering enough, there are also Blessing Cards to discuss. These cards, unlocked via the little desk in the town square, begin to appear at random while you're gathering resources, and you get a choice of which perk you want added to your current run. 

You can increase your luck, making Blessing Cards more likely to appear, or unlock the chance for other nodes across the map to be mined automatically whenever you manually mine one. You can also unleash fire and thunder across the map, which will destroy nodes for you. Every Blessing provides a boost to the number of resources you're able to gather during each run. 

If you're a fan of incremental games, you probably know exactly what I mean when I say every little helps. Even the tiniest improvement makes a massive difference to the success of your runs, so you can imagine how much it helps when Thor is apparently on your side. 

Tiny Village is marked as “Coming Soon” on Steam, so we'll have to wait for a release date for the full game. However, the demo is pretty substantial and more than enough to keep you entertained in the meantime, and it's available through Steam right now.