Pixels Journal

When the days start getting shorter and it gets colder outside… it is the perfect time to get inside and play games with winter-ish themes.

That is why I booted up Winter Burrow, an indie game released late last year. It is a survival game with a really beautiful art style. Each character and environment looks like an image out of a children’s book. That was also the reason why it was one of my personal most anticipated games. But in the end, its story and gameplay were kinda disappointing.

A Story about going home
Developer Pine Greek Games describes Winter Burrow as a “cozy woodland survival game about a mouse returning home to restore their childhood burrow.” You will be exploring, gathering resources, crafting, knitting warm sweaters, baking pies, and meeting the locals.

These characters will also need your help. All these inhabitants of the forest have their own (mostly) emotional story paths, but they reference each other in their dialogues. Although there are different quest lines, the game is overall pretty linear, since you will need an item for certain quests that you unlock by helping out one of the characters.

I think this is a pretty fun way to advance through the story, but the quests themselves were pretty repetitive. You are most of the time just looking for a specific item or person hidden in the woods, which makes you explore the map in an organic way. But this became just so boring after a while. There were also some quests in which you have to craft something for someone and gather the resources you need for it. I would rather have seen more of these types of quests, since those are more interesting for a survival-ish game.

I also didn’t find every character’s story as interesting. It kinda felt like the developers were trying too hard to make emotional characters with sad stories. Most of the time I’m all for these kinds of narratives, but since every character was sad in their own way, it just feels kinda forced. Though, a few quest lines ended in a really dark way and hit me in an emotional way.

Survival-ish?
As a survival game, Winter Burrow also lacked depth. It has some really useful features from other survival games. You can, for example, track the items you need to craft something, and you get a chest at the start of the game with almost unlimited space. But I wouldn’t really call this game a survival game, since it wasn’t really challenging to stay alive. You are mostly fighting against the cold, but there are enough points on the map that will warm your little mouse up again. The world also isn’t that big, and you have a map that makes navigation really easy, so you won’t have a hard time finding these places. The variation in enemies is also very limited and not very challenging.

Besides just doing the story, there also isn’t much to do in the world. You can fix your burrow, but this doesn’t really give an advantage, it’s almost purely decorative. I just wished that Winter Burrow had a bigger world to explore, more creatures to find, and more to do in general in this beautiful world. But after beating the game in about 7 hours, there isn’t really any reason to keep building on your burrow or keep exploring the forest.

Verdict
Winter Burrow is a really cozy game with a beautiful art style and an interesting premise. Exploring the snowy forest, helping its inhabitants, and slowly uncovering their stories can be enjoyable at first, but the quests given by these characters get repetitive pretty fast. Some of the animals’ stories really hit emotionally, but most of the narrative feels kinda forced. On top of that, the survival elements lack depth and challenge, which makes the game feel more like a relaxed adventure than an actual survival experience. While it’s a pleasant game to play for a few hours, it doesn’t fully live up to its potential.