After years of refinement, crafting and survival games have developed a pretty effective formula: You’re dropped into a place where you gather sticks, you use the sticks to make an axe, the axe lets you cut down trees, and before long, you’re making a whole shelter and advancing up a tech tree and making more and more complex gear, mastering the wilderness around you.
Winter Burrow doesn’t stray from that formula–at least, not in its first 20 minutes. But while it feels very similar to other survival games, most notably Don’t Starve, it sets itself apart through its tone and approach. Winter Burrow applies a cozy aesthetic to its survival, combining the feeling of danger with a sense that what you’re building isn’t a shelter to keep you alive, but a home.
I played a short demo of Winter Burrow at Xbox’s Gamescom event in Los Angeles, which gave me a quick look at the game from its start. A short cutscene started the demo, setting up the story that follows an anthropomorphic mouse setting off for a new life. The mouse remembers his old home, the burrow, with fondness, but he and his family moved away to find work in the city when he was a child, leaving it in the care of his aunt. His parents worked the city’s mines for years before they both died, and fed up with that life, the mouse heads back to his old home, only to find it in disrepair and his aunt missing.
From that setup, you set to work restoring the burrow. The early gameplay of Winter Burrow is pretty standard for the genre; you need to gather up sticks and grass so you can start a fire, repair a crafting bench, and fix up an easy chair. In the beginning, the game is a series of quick forays out into the area around the burrow to grab supplies before trucking them back in to make gear and upgrades. And as is usually the case, you’re also managing gauges like hunger, exhaustion, and temperature.
Even in its state of disrepair, the burrow has the sense of being a nice place to live with a little sprucing up, and that’s amplified by Winter Burrow’s storybook art style and its cute mouse protagonist. The game generally gives off a relaxed atmosphere, especially when you’re in the burrow, doing things like sitting in your chair. The easy chair is actually your crafting facility for creating new clothes that will keep you warmer and offer more protection, but the animation for making them has your mouse sitting by the fire and knitting, a perfect illustration of Winter Burrow’s cozy approach.
“Cozy” does not mean the game removes the usual stresses of a survival game, though. Despite only playing 20 minutes, I encountered some stark realities as I was wandering around, trying to find eight bundles of grass to make a rope or enough pieces of wood to craft some planks. The operative word in the name Winter Burrow is “winter,” and when you return to your family home, it’s snowy and freezing out. The clothes you start with aren’t enough to protect you from the chill for long, and even with the sweater, pants, and hat I knitted for myself early on, the creeping cold could quickly become deadly.
What’s more, there’s no map available in Winter Burrow, at least in the early game. Everything is covered with snow, leaving the landscape somewhat devoid of landmarks, and even though I didn’t wander far from the burrow, I found it very easy to become lost. The only reliable way to find your way home is to retrace your footprints or just remember the landscape, and if you don’t make it back before your temperature gauge depletes, you’ll freeze and die, dropping everything you’re carrying where you fell.
The cold is surprisingly dangerous and definitely stressful. I got caught up searching for the supplies I needed and only realized how much the temperature gauge had dropped when frost started creeping in at the edges of the screen, and by that point, I had no idea how to get back to the burrow. While I encountered a couple of large, dangerous beetles roaming that first area, the weather was the real danger, and once I’d succumbed to it, the standard gameplay loop of running out to find the stuff I needed before returning home became a lot more oppressive. Winter Burrow is a cute game, but it’s still a serious one.
My demo ended not long after I started, just as I was repairing a bridge to cross a gap and explore a new area. I didn’t get far into Winter Burrow, but I did encounter a couple other animals, both of whom seemed friendly and likely to dish out side quests in the near future. While there were a few hostile bugs around, my sense was that most of the conflict in Winter Burrow will come from braving the elements, without much in the way of other hostile characters.
If there was a downside to Winter Burrow, it was that this early look relied very heavily on the same kind of formula that’s present in most similar games. I spent a lot of time searching for one more log or tuft of grass because I needed just a couple more resources before I could craft the thing I needed to proceed. Your pockets fill in a hurry, so in addition to keeping an eye on your food and temperature, you’ll also need to manage your inventory by dumping stuff in a box in the burrow. These elements aren’t outwardly bad, but they are pretty rote at this point, and it feels like the experience of Winter Burrow will include a lot of moments when you wish you could proceed but have to stop to do things like make space in your bag or run back to the burrow and warm up before you can proceed.
With most survival games, though, the experience picks up once you’re clear of the early game and can see what’s on offer when you’re not busy with the work of just staying alive until the next day. In my early look at Winter Burrow, I didn’t get to see what’s next, but the art style, music, and generally soft and inviting feel of the game have me intrigued. Winter Burrow maintains the core ideas of the survival genre, and some of the ways it challenges players, while adopting an altogether less oppressive approach, and I want to see where that approach leads.
Winter Burrow is coming to PC, Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One, and Game Pass in early 2025.
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