Winter Burrow Review - A Sad And Snowy Survival Story
Winter Burrow is what happens if you take Don’t Starve, make the protagonist a mouse, and add knitting.
You start out in your family’s old burrow during the winter snow, foraging what you can from the surrounding area and returning often so you can warm your paws by the fire. Gradually, as you craft better clothes and supplies, you are able to stray further from home and collect more advanced resources. These resources can be used to build better equipment or to furnish your burrow.
It’s a tried and tested gameplay loop that has been adapted to an adorable environment. The character design in this game is excellent and the sound design creates a pleasant world to exist in while foraging and exploring. But there’s also something melancholic underpinning the aesthetics of this game, mirroring the nature of the survival genre. The narrative is immediately quite sad, and doesn’t hold any punches as you progress through the story.
Despite the design of Winter Burrow working well in theory, in practise it falls flat. The pacing of the game feels unpolished, leaving the player to feel lost or bored too often. There is a lack of guidance, with quest objectives more likely saying something like ‘Learn from Auntie’ for a prolonged period instead of updating with the each task Auntie has set (like ‘Cook Something at your Stove’ or ‘Craft a Shovel’). This can make it difficult to figure out exactly what needs to be done to progress, especially if you have to leave and return to the game in between conversations with the quest giver.
I also found myself slowly traipsing over the same area over and over. This can sometimes be a pleasant experience, as you become more familiar with your surroundings, especially your central hub. But in Winter Burrow it was either because I’d misplaced the entrance to my burrow again (there are paths but they end before the field of vision reveals your burrow, so it can be surprisingly easy to wander the wrong way) or because I’d run out of inventory space. It didn’t take me long to craft enough food to stay comfortable and find firepits further from home where I could warm up; the most frustrating lack of resources I had while playing was lack of space. Even when I tried to just give up and walk past the various collectables I was finding, I would still get stuck because quests were asking me to gather resources so I could progress.
Winter Burrow is also lacking some key settings that I look for in a game. The controls aren’t always intuitive, but there’s no way to rebind keys in the settings. The game doesn’t automatically pause when you alt-tab to a different window, meaning sometimes I would accidentally lose chunks of my day because I was briefly doing something in another window. These are minor gripes, but represent the general quality of life features this game is missing.
Overall, Winter Burrow is not all style no substance, but it’s close. The environments, music, and character design are wonderful, but their quality is unfortunately not matched by the pacing and feel of the game. But there’s a lot of potential here, so I’m hopeful player feedback and ongoing updates might help resolve some of those issues.
Winter Burrow was reviewed on PC with a code kindly provided by Xbox Australia.
