Winter Burrow is a cozy game with surprisingly tricky survival gameplay

In terms of my gaming tastes, I tend to be a bit of a contraction. I love the vibe of cozy games — cute animals, cohesive color palettes, distinctive art ranging from pixels to painterly to handdrawn, taking place in lovely locales. However, I’m also drawn to the gameplay of survival sims and looter shooters. I love to loot til I’m just this side of encumbered while beaning Unreal asset store zombies in the dome with a baseball bat. What’s a girl to do?

Enter Winter Burrow. The cozy vibe and the survival looter aspects are both on point. You can get the vibe just from the still images, which are handdrawn in a way which reminds me of childrens’ books, specifically The Mitten by Jan Brett. You play as a mouse who moves back from the city to their now-abandoned childhood home burrow in the country. You need to make your nest cozy, since you just arrived back during the winter. You have to leave the warmth in order to come back in and warm your feet by the fire, which is a very cozy feeling. There’s also a bit of story to contend with, though I haven’t made it through much of that at this point.

By contrast, in some ways, Winter Burrow is more hardcore than the grittiest survival sim — like The Long Dark, the cold is one of the most restrictive elements you’ll have to contend with, presenting the need to plan trips carefully so you can be back in your burrow before you freeze. Except, instead of murdering your way through rabbits for a hat, you collect fallen grass and then spend time in your little mousey burrow knitting to make warm clothing. You also have to keep an eye on your food store, and deal with limited storage and energy, but there are generally fewer items to bloat the process than most looter shooters — for some players, this may be a negative. You don’t get to fully base build, but you do get to craft and place furniture, though each one has a different bonus, so you may not want to use the furniture you think is the cutest.

I do feel like the control scheme is a little clunky, and this is likely in part because it was more developed with a controller in mind than mouse and keyboard. You assign items to a 5-slot belt, then activate the item by hitting 1-5 keys or toggling through them with z or x, then press spacebar to actually use them. But that’s a nitpicky complaint. Other than that, it smashes together my weird preferences in a way which is fun and unique. If you’re not sold yet, the demo is still available on Steam if you’d like to give it a spin. It’s also a part of the Steam Animal Fest going on this week.

Winter Burrow is now available for PC on Steam, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox.