Winter Burrow

As promised, and before people storm back to their offices with the wild notion I should answer their e-mails and phone calls, I need to spend a couple of words on this game because it’s delightful.

Winter Burrow is a survival game, meaning it’s a game in which your main focus is surviving and upgrading your shelter through crafting tools that become more and more refined, thus allowing you to extract more refined resources with which you can craft more refined tools to extract better resources and so on. The other survival game I played recently was Nightingale, and I always liked the crafting part, even in games where it wasn’t the core (Skyrim, I’m talking to you), so it’s no surprise I would enjoy this.

The underlying story of Winter Burrow is pretty simple: you play as a young mouseling who returns to his childhood burrow only to find it in shambles. He needs to reconnect with his aunt and fix his home, all while braving the cold weather and maybe finding a couple of new friends along the (snowy) road.

The game has cooking, woodworking and knitting, fighting bugs with your axe, and some charming quests involving other woodland creatures. Oh, and it’s fucking cold. The more you stay exposed to the chilling weather, the more your warmth decreases, and you need to be prepared with your favourite brew of tea, your hand-crafted woollen mittens and some skills you’ll pick up along the way.

So, what’s nice about it?

Pretty much everything. The character design is awesome, and everything’s charmingly designed as if it were hand-illustrated. There’s a huge variety of custom furniture, and the new Winter Solstice update added seasonal charm like a sprinkle of dragée chocolate, I loved the free exploration, and it’s nice to recognise barriers as elements you’ll be able to take down with a better tool. The quests are also nice and, while being stories about woodland creatures, they’re never too sugary, with some good, heartless writing here and there. The sound effects are lovely and the soundtrack by Andreas Busk deserves the purchase.

Also, the cold mechanics is powerful enough for you to feel it, but it never gets frustrating. You just need to be prepared. As any woodland mouse would be.