Winter Burrow was announced in an Xbox showcase back in June, but it more or less promptly fell off my radar: while I love a survival game, especially one with snow, I’m not necessarily a “cozy” games fan. I will be 100% honest that it came back in front of me thanks to a press release about a new trailer this week, and I will be even more honest that this form of outreach did exactly what it was supposed to, because I then played the game’s Steam demo, and it is extremely my thing.
In Winter Burrow, you play as a tiny mouse who has returned to their remote childhood home to fix it up. There’s a lot of the usual stuff of survival games: hunger, stamina, and temperature meters to manage; items to forage and craft; a day/night cycle that means you need to be careful with your time. The “cozy” aspect comes through in the form of aesthetics; instead of crafting a coat out of the hides of slaughtered wolves like in my favorite game The Long Dark, you knit thick sweaters in your tattered armchair next to the fire.
The demo took me about 15 minutes and was mostly an introduction to the basics of the game, tasking me with repairing some items around the burrow and the surrounding world. That world is big and cold and challenging; I easily got lost in all the snow and rocks and froze to death with surprising frequency. On death, you drop your items and can retrieve them, but on a few occasions I had simply wandered too far and had to abandon my loot. Knitting a fuzzy sweater and pants helped me survive a bit longer, but they didn’t stop the cold from keeping me on my toes. Dread would fill me as my screen started icing over and I’d rush back to my burrow.
I know everyone isn’t a fan of this kind of survival game rhythm (or as prone to getting lost in games), but I love it. In many games, traversing the world is negligible, but I love games that use cold to make navigation such a present challenge, where surviving small jaunts out of your base feel like big achievements. This pace feels like it fits well with the fact that your character is a mouse, a creature that’s inherently tiny and vulnerable and always looks a bit outmatched. This made me appreciate the cozy aspects of the game; making a hot meal and nice clothes for a tiny mouse made me feel like I was taking care of a stressed-out pet, and gave me the same feeling as when I scrape together enough resources to make my character a hot cup of coffee in The Long Dark.
When the demo ended I groaned “nnooo…,” so now that I’ve followed its plot threads, I’m curious to jump back in and explore the world more. Winter Burrow is due to come out in 2025.
