Winter Burrow is a survival game inspired by Over the Garden Wall that's as comfy as a pair of mouse-skin slippers

Out on PC today

A mouse cannot live on adorable visual aesthetics alone, but Winter Burrow is definitely handsome enough to get me through to lunchtime. In this just-released survival game from Danish developers Pine Creek Games, you play a rodent who has returned from the Rodent Big City to fix up their old treestump home.

It's something of a tragedy: your parents died in Rodent Big City, after working themselves to toothpicks, and your aunt has now gone missing. But the hand-illustrated 2D art style immediately lifts the mood. Look at your cutaway living room, with its cheerfully blazing fireplace! Look at those creamy hummocks of snow! Look at your frosty carcass being devoured by a spider!

I feel like the winningly tatty Hundred Acre ambience might be at odds with the survival game premise, past a certain point, but the developers do note that Winter Burrow is based on "a dream of being able to play a survival game that was more forgiving than the genre usually is, but where there was still challenge and depth." They also observe that "the setting is inspired by books like 'The Wind in the Willows', the comic 'Mouse Guard' and the animated TV-series 'Over the Garden Wall'."

Personally, my mind flew to the Deptford Mice novels of Robin Jarvis, and especially The Crystal Prison, in which mice battle spectres in a cornfield. Those books are pretty grisly but they at least don't have any mouse-eating spiders, that I can remember. Also, there's a setting for turning the spiders off in Winter Burrow.

I've had a quick play of the demo, and it seems to hang together well enough as a survival game. The thrill of it right now is mostly unlocking rustic art assets, but it seems sturdily made for a survive 'em up, with a digestible UI and simple controls.

There are some congenial flourishes that bring warmth to the familiar business of stuffing sticks and stones into item recipes - for example, you'll knit new clothes in your plump and patchy armchair, rather than hammering out new socks and jerkins in a forge, as is often the case in less sentimental and internally consistent survival games. You can also make friends with neighbours while searching for your lost aunt, and there's talk of baking pies. Read more on Steam. If you prefer your mice to be mildly rotten and capable of hacking badgers to death, maybe try Mouseward instead.