Review: Winter Burrow (Switch) - Cosy Survival, But Doesn't Go Deep Enough

Scariest creature in this wood

Developed by Pine Creek Games and published by Noodlecake, Winter Burrow is a cosy woodland survival game where you play as a mouse who braves frigid weather, collects food and resources, and rebuilds their childhood home.

It begins with the death of our young mouse protagonist's parents, prompting a return to the long-abandoned family burrow. It's an opening that echoes the call for a simpler, more self-actualised life that is seen at the beginning of Stardew Valley and many early Harvest Moon titles, yet Winter Burrow's beginning is tinged with a sadness that threads itself through the remaining plot in a way that feels appropriate for a cast of wildlife creatures trying to survive a brutal winter.

Given the suitably melancholy start of the game, I was hopeful that Winter Burrow would weave together the cosy and the cruel in a survival landscape equal parts challenging and charming. For a survival game, however, Winter Burrow is lacking in that oh-so-important tension between risk and reward. The resulting experience is surprisingly linear and short-lived despite its artful aesthetic presentation. While you can technically spend as long as you want building furniture and decorating the burrow, gaining access to all the tools and areas through the main plot takes under 10 hours; there’s not much to entertain afterwards.

The art style has often been compared to that of Don't Starve, but the two games have distinct approaches to the mechanics of survival. When you die in Don't Starve, you lose all of your progress and must begin again from the start of an entirely different world map.

There are multiple ways to deplete your health in Winter Burrow — taking damage from the varying forms of bugs that wander the wilderness, staying out in the cold for too long, or simply starving — but death isn't actually a possibility for our little mouse. They simply pass out, dropping all of their items in an animation also reminiscent of Klei Entertainment's game, and find themself back at home none the worse.

Passing out would be more of a deterrent if resources were more precious, but it’s easy to replenish everything, from building materials like wood and rocks to ingredients such as nuts and berries. The joy of tracking down and even stockpiling difficult-to-come-by ingredients is half the fun of crafting in survival games. Crafting in Winter Burrow feels like it requires a grocery list more than a treasure hunt. Making new, updated clothing is worthwhile since it generally offers better cold resistance, but the majority of furniture is just for looks.

Winter Burrow is meant to be more forgiving than your everyday survival game, and it certainly accomplishes that. There just isn’t a whole lot gameplay-wise to fill the holes in a survival game that isn’t very challenging. Although the woodland neighbours are interesting and distinctive, their interactions are limited, and once you’re done with the main story, there’s not much reason to stick around.

The Danish developers describe Winter Burrow as a game where “it is you who tells the story.” These kinds of buzz phrases seem to pop up more and more often as the years go on, but it feels like a particularly inaccurate description in this case. The player does not make choices that impact the plot in Winter Burrow. Certain sections of the map are inaccessible without specific tools, which can’t be constructed without completing NPC requests. It’s a plot on a train track - not at all what I would call telling my own story, and a bit out of place with survival game norms.

What Winter Burrow gets right, though, it gets very right indeed. The art that renders the intrepid winter wonderland is beautiful. The music and sound design lend themselves well to each scene and scenario. A little mouse knitting in a big armchair next to a crackling fire is as cosy as it gets, and don’t even get me started on getting to dress a mouse up in different tiny hats and sweaters.

In terms of performance, the game held up well in both handheld and docked mode, although the images are crisper and the UI is easier to make out while playing docked on a larger screen. It was sometimes difficult to tell what menu option was currently selected while crafting and looking at the required materials in handheld mode, but this is a pretty minor complaint.

Conclusion

Ultimately, Winter Burrow is a fun, cute game that could make for a cosy weekend, but its lack of mechanical depth precludes it from lasting significance.

Don’t get me wrong: a nice, linear plot and the ability to make cute furnishings for a hollowed-out tree of a home can be a lovely gaming experience. If only because the scaffolding itself is so wonderfully crafted, I wanted more from Winter Burrow than it was able to give.