Vol. VII · No. 3
Toronto · Est. 2019
Free to read
An editorial showcase of small Android games
HeroGlams is a quiet monograph for loud times — eight hand-picked titles from Google Play, printed in black and white so the games can carry the colour themselves.
Open the collection01 The Collection Eight titles
Every title below is a real listing on Google Play. Tap through to the store to install — we host nothing, sell nothing, and choose only what we would happily play twice. Ratings are shown exactly as they stand on the store, warts and all.
Entry 01 — Annapurna Interactive
A wordless graphic novel you play with your thumbs. Florence follows a twenty-five-year-old through the giddy arithmetic of a first serious love — brushing teeth, splitting rent, learning where one life ends and another begins. Forty tender minutes, and not a syllable wasted.
Entry 02 — Broken Rules
You do not run or jump here; you reshape the land itself, sliding hilltops until a footpath appears. Between each puzzle, a sun-warmed memory unfolds — of choices made, letters unsent, a life quietly reckoned with. A meditation dressed as a game.
Entry 03 — Plug In Digital
A rhythm game told in flashback: match the beat and a summer of 1970s garage bands, dreams and near-misses replays in psychedelic bloom. All but unrated on the store, which is precisely why it belongs here — an overlooked record worth putting the needle back on.
Entry 04 — Crunchyroll
A young painter races to finish one last canvas for a gallery submission — and the apartment across the street holds the missing colour. Hand-drawn in the warm key of a Ghibli afternoon, with a score that lingers. The highest-rated title on this shelf, and it earns every star.
Entry 05 — Devolver Digital
A young woman moves through a world drained of colour, and with each chapter a hue returns. There are no enemies and no way to fail — only grief, gently learned, rendered in watercolour that would not look out of place on a gallery wall. Play it with headphones.
Entry 06 — Amanita Design
A curious gnome finds a magic flute and follows it across a solar system of hand-built worlds — mossy, mechanical, half-dreamed. Every screen is a tiny diorama begging to be prodded. Unhurried, strange, and utterly its own thing.
Entry 07 — Amanita Design
A hairy little troublemaker will do absolutely anything to get his cherry back. What follows is pure slapstick — a cartoon that answers your taps with squawks, pratfalls and inspired nonsense. The rare game that makes strangers on a train laugh out loud.
Entry 08 — U&I Next
Set a block of wood spinning, press the chisel in, and watch curls of virtual shaving fall away as a bowl, a spindle, a chess piece takes shape. A tiny, almost hypnotic ode to the craft of turning — the quietest surprise in the collection.
02 In Focus Three long looks
i.
Few games have the nerve to be this slow. GRIS asks nothing of your reflexes and everything of your attention: you walk, you fall, you stand again, and a world that began as a pencil sketch fills — chapter by chapter — with colour. It is a game about loss that never once says the word. On a phone, held close in a dark room, it plays less like a game than like a piece of music you happen to be steering.
ii.
The genius of Florence is how much it trusts the small gesture. Fitting puzzle pieces into a conversation that gets easier as two people relax; watching those pieces multiply again when things sour. It borrows the grammar of comics — panels, pacing, the turn of a page — and hands it to your thumb. Nobody should be able to say this much in forty minutes without a single line of dialogue. Florence does.
iii.
A deadline, a half-finished canvas, and the apartment across the street where the missing colour lives. Behind the Frame is a mystery told the long way round, in warm hand-drawn light and a score you will hum for days. It is short by design — an afternoon, no more — and it uses that afternoon the way a good short story uses its final line. The highest-rated title we show, and rightly so.
03 The Interview In conversation
The two-person studio behind a handful of pocket-sized games sat down with us on a rainy afternoon in the Mile End to talk about scope, restraint, and why she still builds for the phone in your hand.
HeroGlams
You make deliberately tiny games. In an industry that measures worth in hours of content, why stay small?
Because I think the phone rewards it. Nobody opens a game on the bus expecting forty hours; they have four stops. A small game respects that. It says, here is one complete idea, held whole in your hand, and when it is done it lets you go. I have never understood the shame around brevity. We do not ask a short film to apologise for not being a boxed set.
The other reason is honesty. Two people cannot fake an enormous world, so we do not try. We make the one room we can furnish beautifully.
HeroGlams
HeroGlams prints everything in black and white. As someone who works in colour, does that not wound you a little?
Honestly? I find it flattering. When you desaturate a page, the eye stops shopping and starts reading. Whatever colour is left has to come from the thing itself — a screenshot, a piece of key art. It puts the work on a pedestal instead of a shelf tag. I wish more storefronts had the confidence to get out of the way like that.
HeroGlams
What can a phone give a game that a console never will?
Intimacy, and interruption. The screen is a hand's width from your face — it is the most private screen most people own. You play in bed, on a platform, in a waiting room. A game that understands that can be gentle in a way a television game rarely is. And the interruptions are a gift, not a bug. If a player can put you down mid-thought and come back, you have to earn the coming-back. That keeps you honest.
A short game is not a small idea. It is an idea with the confidence to stop.
— Juniper Kwan
HeroGlams
Is there a risk that “small and atmospheric” becomes its own tired formula — the sad little indie about grief?
Oh, completely, and I say that as a repeat offender. Melancholy is easy to gesture at and hard to actually build. The tell is whether the feeling is earned by the mechanics or just painted on top in a nice font. GRIS earns it because the act of moving is the metaphor. When a game only borrows the mood, you feel the seams. So the challenge is not to be small — anyone can be small — it is to be small and specific.
HeroGlams
What is on your own phone right now?
Samorost, again — I reinstall it every couple of years like rereading a favourite book. A Musical Story, which I think is criminally overlooked; the store barely knows it exists. And Lathe Machine, of all things, which I open when I cannot sleep. There is something about watching the shavings peel away that resets my whole nervous system. Not every game needs to be about something. Some just need good hands.
HeroGlams
Last one. What would you say to a developer sitting on a strange, tiny, seemingly unmarketable idea?
Build the small version first, and build it all the way to the end. A finished tiny thing teaches you more than an unfinished grand one, and it is the only version anyone will ever get to hold. The market you are worried about is mostly a story you are telling yourself. Make the one room. Furnish it well. Someone will want to live there for an afternoon — and an afternoon, done right, is plenty.
04 Manifesto A statement of intent
We hang small games on a white wall and print the page in black — so the only colour left in the room is the work itself.
HeroGlams is a refusal, quietly made: of the storefront and its screaming banners, of the star-rating arms race, of the infinite scroll that never asks you to stop. We choose eight titles at a time, describe each the way you would describe a painting to a friend, and then step out of the light.
01
Small is not minor.
A game that ends in an afternoon can still change the shape of your week. Scope is not the same as significance.
02
The work carries the colour.
We strip the page back to ink and paper so nothing on it competes with what the developer actually made.
03
Curation over accumulation.
A short, honest shelf beats an endless feed. We would far rather hand you eight good things than ten thousand.
05 Readers From the postbag
Florence taught me more about love in forty minutes than most novels manage in four hundred pages.
Priya Nair — Toronto, ON
I finished GRIS on the streetcar and had to sit a moment before I could stand up.
Marc-André Bélanger — Montréal, QC
Old Man's Journey respects silence. I keep it on my phone the way you keep a good photograph in a wallet.
Hannah Whitfield — Halifax, NS
Every screen of Samorost 3 is a small painting you get to poke at. My kind of Sunday.
Dev Sharma — Vancouver, BC
CHUCHEL made a full carriage of commuters laugh out loud. No small feat before nine in the morning.
Eleanor Beaumont — Ottawa, ON
Behind the Frame — the colours, the score, the ache of it. I've recommended it to everyone I trust.
Joon-ho Park — Calgary, AB
A Musical Story is an overlooked little thing that deserves far more than the handful of ratings it has.
Rosa Fontaine — Québec City, QC
Lathe Machine 3D is oddly meditative. I turn a virtual bowl and my shoulders drop an inch.
Tom Beausoleil — Winnipeg, MB
HeroGlams is the only games page I read like a magazine — cover to cover, every time.
Grace Adeyemi — Mississauga, ON
No screaming banners, no ‘download now’. Just good writing about games I would never have found.
Liam O'Connell — St. John's, NL
I trust the taste here. Every pick has been a small, well-chosen pleasure.
Mei Lin Chow — Richmond, BC
The black-and-white layout makes the games themselves the loudest thing on the page. Clever.
Sarah Kowalski — Edmonton, AB
06 Gallery Plates & impressions
A wall of impressions gathered while playing — arcades after hours, screens in the dark, hands mid-game. Printed in black and white, the way we run the whole magazine.
07 About The editor's note
The EditorToronto
HeroGlams began as a list of games I kept texting to friends.
The list got long, and the texts got embarrassing, so in 2019 it became this — a small, independent showcase run out of a studio on Queen Street West. We are not a store and not a review farm chasing every new release. We are closer to a well-kept shelf: a handful of Android games, chosen slowly, described honestly, and pointed straight at their real Google Play listings.
The house style is deliberate. Everything here is set in black and white, in a serif that belongs in a museum catalogue, because the games we love already carry more than enough colour of their own. Strip the page back to ink and paper and the work — the little worlds these developers built — is the loudest thing left in the room.
08 Questions Before you write in
01 What exactly is HeroGlams?
An independent editorial showcase of hand-picked Android games. We curate and write; we do not host, sell, or distribute any game.
02 Do the links cost anything?
No. Every “Open on Google Play” button leads to the game's real store listing. Any price is set by the developer and Google, not by us.
03 How do you choose the games?
By feel more than by numbers. We favour small, atmospheric, often overlooked titles — craft over install counts — and we only list what we would gladly replay.
04 Are you affiliated with the developers?
No. HeroGlams is entirely independent. All game names, icons and artwork remain the property of their respective studios and are shown for reference.
05 What does the newsletter send?
An occasional dispatch — a short note when a new title joins the shelf. No noise, no selling your details, and you can unsubscribe from any issue.
06 Can developers submit a game?
Yes, and we read every one. Write to us at [email protected] with a link — small studios especially welcome.
07 Why is everything black and white?
A house rule. Removing colour from the page lets each game's own art do the shouting — and keeps the reading calm.
08 Do you use cookies?
Only the minimum needed to remember your cookie choice and run the site. The details live in our Cookie Policy.
09 Join the List One quiet dispatch
Leave your details and we will send a short note whenever a new game earns a place on the shelf — plus the occasional longer read. No noise, ever.