Winter Burrow is a cozy woods survival game, and for the most part, that's what continues. From the get-go, the atmosphere is basic: a mouse returns from the city to discover that its childhood home is trashed and that its Aunt is missing. The world is a limited, peaceful place centered around finding, making, and improving your burrow. It's a good plan, and the atmosphere is strong enough to inspire you through the first couple of days.
It’s a short game, and you can complete it within a span of about ten hours. That's a good thing, because survival games don't necessarily have to be endless affairs. Here, most of this experience is spent on a repetitive cycle of exploring the frozen forest, gathering materials, making initial tools, surviving through the harmful insects, and then starting to build your house again. It’s a cycle that’s working, but never really evolving to keep you engaged.
It’s visually where it’s at its best - the setting of the forest is refreshing, the inside of the burrow is warm and detailed, and the characters look good. The soundtrack integrates well without drowning out gameplay, aligning well with its slower pace.
It’s a good thing that the game’s plot is a mystery, because that mystery is a good reason for you to get to other parts of the game without detracting from the survival cycle. You can furnish your home the way you want to, and you determine what you can do for each task, so the game is fairly casual, such as making warm clothes, knit sweaters, make pies, and acquire what you need. This is a good way to keep survival casual, where you’re not punished for mistakes. That is perfect for this game’s purpose, where your game is supposed to be a casual experience and a pleasure, not a survival situation.
The trouble that Winter Burrow is that there is a lack of depth to this game, to the gathering and crafting of materials, where the game world ends up giving you the same patterns after a couple of hours of play. It’s good for a short game, but that’s about where its replay value ends up. Winter Burrow is a game that sets a task that is perfect for what you experience, a quick survival ride of what is basically a world of a survival experience.
