Over the years, crafting and survival games have developed a formula that works extremely well: you’re thrown into a place, where you collect sticks, you use the sticks to make an axe, the ax lets you chop down trees, and before long, you’re building A complete shelter, progress along the tech tree, craft increasingly complex gear, and conquer the wilderness around you.
“Winter Burrow” doesn’t deviate from this formula—at least not in the first 20 minutes. While it feels very similar to other survival games (most notably Don’t Starve), its tone and approach are distinct. Winter Burrow incorporates a cozy aesthetic into its survival, combining a sense of danger with the feeling that you’re building not a shelter for your survival, but a home.
I played a brief demo of Winter Burrow at the Xbox Gamescom event in Los Angeles, which got me up to speed on the game from the get-go. The demonstration began with a brief cutscene that told the story of an anthropomorphic mouse starting a new life. Mouse has little memory of his old home, the Cave, but when he was a child he and his family moved to the city to work, leaving it in the care of his aunt. His parents worked in the city’s mines for many years before both died. Tired of this life, Mouse returned to his old home, only to find it in disrepair and his aunt missing.
From this setting, you start repairing the cave. Winter Burrow’s early gameplay is pretty standard for the genre; you’ll need to collect sticks and grass so you can make a fire, repair a workbench, and install an easy chair. In the beginning, the game is a series of quick raids into the areas around the caves to get supplies, then truck them back to craft gear and upgrades. As usual, you’ll also need to manage indicators such as hunger, fatigue, and body temperature.
Even in its state of disrepair, the cave could feel like a nice living environment with just a few touches, and the storybook art style and lovable mouse protagonist of Winter Cave amplifies this. The game generally gives off a relaxing atmosphere, especially when you’re in a cave and doing something like sitting on a chair. Easy chairs are actually crafting tools you use to craft new clothes to keep you warm and provide more protection, but the animation that makes them makes your mouse sit and knit by the fire perfectly illustrates Winter Burrow’s cozy approach. .
However, “comfortable” doesn’t mean that the game eliminates the usual stress of survival games. Despite only playing for 20 minutes, I encountered some harsh realities as I wandered around trying to find eight bales of grass to make rope or enough wood to make planks. The key word in the name “Winter Burrow” is “winter”, and when you get home, it’s snowing outside and it’s cold. The clothes you wear in the first place aren’t enough to protect you from the cold for long, and even with the sweater, pants, and hat I knitted for myself earlier, the chilling cold can quickly turn deadly.
What’s more, there is no map available for the Winter Caves, at least not early in the game. Everything was covered in snow, which made the landscape somewhat lacking in landmarks, and although I didn’t wander around the caves, I found it easy to get lost. The only sure way to find your way home is to retrace your steps or memorize the scenery, and if you don’t make it back before the thermometer runs out, you’ll freeze to death and everything you brought with you will fall where it belongs.
The cold is very dangerous and definitely stressful. I was so busy trying to find the supplies I needed that I didn’t realize how far the thermometer had dropped until frost started forming on the edges of the screen, and by that point, I had no idea how to get back to the cave. The weather became a real danger when I encountered several large, dangerous beetles in the first area, and once I succumbed to it, the standard gameplay loop of running out to find what I needed before heading home became That’s a lot. Winter Cave is a cute game, but it’s still a serious game.
My demo ended not long after it started, when I was repairing a bridge to cross a gap and explore a new area. I didn’t get too far into the Winter Cave, but I did encounter a few other animals, all of whom seemed friendly, and may be side quests to complete in the near future. While there are some hostile bugs around, my feeling is that most of the conflict in Winterland Caverns will come from braving the elements, not much different from other hostile characters.
If there’s one downside to Winter Burrow, it’s that this early look relies heavily on the same type of formula present in most similar games. I spent a lot of time looking for more sticks of wood or tufts of grass because I just needed more resources to make the things I needed to keep going. Your pockets fill up quickly, so in addition to keeping an eye on your food and temperature, you’ll also need to manage your inventory by dumping things into boxes in the cave. These elements aren’t bad on the surface, but they’re pretty rote at this point, and it feels like the Winter Cave experience will include a lot of moments where you wish you could keep going, but have to stop and do something like Make space in the room.
As with most survival games, though, the experience improves once you get past the early game, when you’re not busy trying to survive until the next day and you can see what the game has to offer. In my early days of playing Winter Burrow, I didn’t see much of what was coming, but the game’s art style, music, and overall soft and inviting feel kept me interested. Winter Burrow retains the core ideas of the survival genre, and some of the ways it challenges players, while taking a completely less oppressive approach, and I wanted to see where that would lead.
Winter Burrow will be available on PC, Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One in early 2025, as well as Game Pass.
