Winter Burrow

Winter Burrow is the first game from Danish Pine Creek Games, and they describe it as a "cosy woodland survival game." Game director Benjamin Salquist has previously stated that Winter Burrow offers both cosiness and challenge, placing it somewhere between the charming Animal Crossing and the far more consistently challenging Don't Starve.

In Winter Burrow, you take on the role of a cute little birch mouse, which (fun fact!) is actually one of Denmark's rarest mammals. This mouse grew up in the countryside, but at some point moves with its parents to the tempting big city. However, life in the city is not what the little family had hoped for, and the parents wear themselves out in the mines, and tragically, they don't manage to save enough money to move back to the countryside before the hard work costs them their lives.

Our little birch mouse now sells everything the little family has in the city and returns to its childhood home, a small mouse hole at the bottom of a large tree stump in the countryside. The mouse hole is cold and dilapidated, so the first thing the little mouse has to do is light the fireplace with some twigs lying on the floor so it can keep warm. Then it has to build a simple bed, repair the old armchair that still stands in the middle of the living room, and make a small axe.

It won't be long before the little mouse has to venture outside into the cold and harsh forest floor to collect twigs, branches, stones, mushrooms, leaves, berries, blades of grass, and many other things. All these things can be used to produce everything from yarn and rope to tools and food, so that one can survive the cold winter.

The mouse hole has an old stove, which is quickly repaired so that the mouse can now make everything from roasted chanterelles, roasted beetles, various kinds of biscuits and jam, different pies, and delicious hot tea from the berries it has found. It's quite cosy to furnish the small, warm mouse hole, which stands in sharp contrast to the dangerous world just outside the door.

There are not many games where knitting is a central part of the game, but it is in Winter Burrow. With the fibres and plant parts you find on the forest floor, you have to make your own yarn, as mentioned before, so you can knit yourself a coat and a hat, for example, to keep warm when you are out gathering resources. Outside, the cold is pretty much your biggest enemy, especially if you, perhaps a little unwisely, venture outside at night, so it's important to be well wrapped up. At home in your armchair, in addition to making coats and hats, you can also make yourself a larger backpack so you can bring more resources home with you when you're out.

Winter Burrow has a clearly divided structure, where one part is your warm and cosy mouse hole and the other is the wild nature outside your door. At home in the mouse hole, you can enjoy cooking, making yarn and knitting, repairing furniture, growing mushrooms and much more, but the outdoors is dangerous and unforgiving, yet you are forced to go out there because all the resources you need are found on the forest floor. As you acquire more and more tools, you open up new areas and meet both friends and enemies out here.

I'm not usually a big fan of survival games, because I quickly find them overwhelming, and it sometimes feels like you're doing chores instead of enjoying yourself. Winter Burrow is definitely a "survival lite" game, but you still have to keep a close eye on your hunger, health, and stamina, and you have to make sure you stay warm. It's surprisingly easy to get into, and finding or crafting what you need doesn't feel like a chore because most of it is quite intuitive and never becomes overwhelming or tedious, as it can in other survival games.

A large part of this is thanks to some menus that, for the most part, work really well, but which naturally take quite a bit of time to use. However, there are a few areas where you have to fiddle around a bit unnecessarily to achieve what you want, and one example is your storage. This is where you place all the resources you find in nature, all the food you make, all the clothes you knit, all the boards you produce, and all the other things you create and find during the game.

As you can probably imagine, you can end up with quite a lot of stuff in your storage along the way, so I would like to see a filtering option so that I can, for example, only see everything that can be eaten or all my clothes, or all my tools. As it is now, everything is mixed together and it quickly becomes unmanageable. You can move things around and place them in groups if you want to, but it's actually a lot of work and it's a chore if you want to have a structured Storage so you can easily keep track of things.

The visual aspect of Winter Burrow is quite beautiful and looks almost hand-drawn. Great attention has been paid to the details and, as mentioned above, the many menus work quite well and help to make the game accessible and easy to get into. The sound is also quite good, with a really nice soundtrack that provides an atmospheric backdrop to the excellent sound effects.

Pine Creek Games has got off to a pretty good start here. Winter Burrow is inspired by Nordic nature and offers plenty of Nordic charm, and I think the game balances the cosy with the challenging in a really good way. Apart from a few minor glitches, mostly concerning how Storage works, it's a well-functioning game in its genre. It may be too simple for some, but if you are looking for a cosy and relaxing game to sit and warm yourself with on dark evenings, perhaps together with your partner, then Winter Burrow is a pretty good bet.

You can already try a demo of Winter Burrow for PC on Steam, and it will also be available on Game Pass on day one.