Steam’s Best New Game Demo Is So Good I Spent 5 Hours Shoveling Sand

When life gets you down, dig a hole

Life ain't great out there at the moment, folks. If you've managed to avoid the fresh horrors of each day's headlines about war and mass incarceration, a trip to the gas station or grocery store is all it takes to clue you in on the general state of things. My usual methods of escapism (books and story-heavy games) aren't cutting it much anymore in the "forget about Things for a while" department. However, I stumbled across a demo for Sandcastle on Steam one night, from Bubblebird Studio, makers of the lovely Haven Park, and thought it might be a restful, zen-like way to try and unwind. Now, I'm playing it for a bit every night.

If you played the fabulous Tiny Glade from Pounce Light, you'll have a general idea about Sandcastle already. It plunks you down in a little diorama-like setting, all sand and gently lapping waves, and it gives you some basic design tools to work with (only its buckets, shovels, and rakes instead of mortar and paint and all that). Bubblebird understands half the fun of making a sandcastle is just messing around, though. That’s why Sandcastle lets you ignore the castle in favor of the sand. I spent the first five minutes making swirly designs with the sand rake, enjoying the soft sounds (it's very much an ASMR game) and just zoning out.

The final version will include multiple sand types and beach layouts — some with little river-like streams of ocean water cutting through the sand, others with more ocean than land, or with water on either side of a narrow sandbar. The demo has just one standard shore, which is entirely okay by me. I've yet to grow tired of the single layout.

Getting a pail for scooping water meant I finally panned the camera over to the ocean, which I had previously ignored, and saw a ton of litter floating around. Clicking it seemed like the natural thing to do, which is how I discovered decorations and a bucketful of new tools. Those sticks and bits of shell and crud in the ocean? Ornaments for your walls (or whatever else you want to put them on). Bottles hold "messages," which included new tools, toys, or landscaping methods, like one for making bridges and one that let me drop a big circle of sand onto whatever. I put that last one to immediate use making lonely outposts on isolated islands.

You can use them for whatever you like, really. The Sandcastle demo had a list of objectives I could aim for if I wanted. Nothing taxing. Just stuff like collecting sticks, which I was doing anyway, or using decorations. Sometimes I cleared them. One time, I spent roughly 10 minutes making high walls and digging out a lake for a toy sailboat I found in one of the bottles, dropping it right in the middle of the bailey in the most impractical and impossible living situation any castle has endured in the history of castles.

Why dig a lake when the ocean is mere inches away? It's a good question. I just felt like it.

Then I made a low-walled harbor using the crenellation tool and had the boat bob around there for a while. It made its way out to sea after a time, as the waves eroded my wall, and the sun bore down on it. I found a spray bottle that lets you make clouds so the sun leaves your creations alone for longer, but I only used it once. The impermanence had a soothing quality. Everything washes away eventually, but in the blank spaces and ruins of the past, you can stretch the boundaries of your imagination and build something new.

Or, y'know, just dig a hole in the sand.

Sandcastle has no release date yet, but unlike your creations, the Steam demo is permanently available.