Smalland had a clear appeal: you played as a tiny person in a giant world, building bases out of twigs and acorns, taming insects to ride across the grass, and fighting off ants and spiders that felt genuinely threatening at your scale. But it also had limitations. The crafting was a straight line from one tier to the next, the creatures you tamed never felt like more than tools, and the world was a single map without much variety between regions. In Smalland 2: Lost Realms, the developers aim to address these core issues and bring more of what made the original great.

The new game is set ages before the original Smalland, in a time before giants colonized the world, and it runs on Unreal Engine 5 rather than the original’s engine. However, this change has received mixed reactions from players due to concerns about poor optimization, with one player responding to the news: “Good luck using UE5. Clearly another dev team that’s so out of touch with the issues this engine causes for most games.”

In Smalland 2, the world has been split into distinct realms rather than one unified map, each with its own landscapes, region specific resources, and creatures attuned to different natural elements. One of the biggest changes is that players will now be able to swim in ponds and streams, sail across larger bodies of water, and take advantage of seasonal changes, as frozen paths in winter unlock new areas. The developers described this as a way to make exploration feel more varied rather than just crossing the same terrain repeatedly.

The creature system has been overhauled from the ground up. In the first game, tamed creatures were managed more like equipment, another slot on your belt not much different from a hatchet or a bow. In Smalland 2, you have to bond with them and keep them fed and cared for, and in return they will fight alongside you and use their unique abilities to help you navigate the world. If you neglect them, they will leave. You can form a party of multiple creatures at once, each bringing a different skill to your group.

Crafting has also been reworked. Where the first game used a linear progression system where you unlocked better recipes in a fixed order, Smalland 2 lets you combine different ingredients with different properties to craft exactly what you need. The intent is to give players more freedom to express their own playstyle rather than following a predetermined upgrade path. The game also introduces the Feyfolk, various communities of creatures with their own settlements and goals that you can interact with, build reputation among, and learn crafts from.

Smalland 2 aims to raise the bar in a variety of areas, but will it deliver? We’ll have to wait and see. Fortunately, not for long, as the game is set to launch later this year, according to the information on its Steam page.