Winter Burrow Review (Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 & PC)

Winter Burrow illustrates the importance of keeping cozy in a candlelit cubby throughout the seasonal shift from winter to spring. It scribbles, no, paints the walls with a stroke that we, as cozy people, love to marvel at between warmer months. I suppose, really, it’s one of those atmospherical sims—a game that compliments a warm cup of coffee and a brief spot of respite between ravenous storms. It doesn’t get everything right, and it does make an attempt to staple more weight to its belt than its capable of carrying. It’s a cozy survival-crafting game; it’s a combat-driven RPG; it’s a fetch quest that loves to keep you plowing back and forth between landmarks and stockpiles. It is, in short, Winter Burrow, and it yearns to be everything at once.

Beneath all of its woolly layers is a cute and charming crafting experience that invites you, the mouse with a heart for restoration and family values, to return to your childhood home to rebuild and re-establish the harmonious nature of a frail burrow. It begins with a clean slate—an old woodland burrow, and a chilly climate that’s devoid of natural resources and natural beauty. As the hero in this cubby-centric domain, you have the task of braving the cold and restoring your home to its former glory. A simple task at heart, yet one that also comes with its own share of curveballs and environmental issues to keep you on your tiny toes.

As I said, Winter Burrow fancies itself as a hybrid experience—a multi-path affair that takes leaves out of multiple books. At its core, it’s a crafting game that invites you to explore and create a sketchbook burrow. However, if you look a little deeper, then you’ll find a slew of additional touches. Does it breathe heart and soul into all of its components? Not at all, no. And yet, it does get one of the most important things right: the ability to build and maintain a sustainable burrow from the comfort of a larger-than-life world. Is that enough to warrant your undivided attention? Eh, yes and no. But, we’ll get to all of that a little later.

Beyond the Ice

Winter Burrow puts you in the itty bitty footsteps of a mouse who, after returning to the family burrow for the winter, makes the monumental decision to rebuild it. Again, it’s a simple concept at heart, yet one that also makes an effort to lather its basic composition with a ton of different elements. There’s combat—a feature that, frankly, doesn’t do the game much justice—and a linear progression that mostly requires you to traipse a seemingly barren sketchbook world to unlock various materials and items to ultimately slog back to your beloved burrow. With that, you can more or less expect to find a lot of scavenging tasks, as well as some rather textbook fetch-like hooks that, frankly, aren’t all that uncommon.

While the act of building and embellishing your home in Winter Burrow is a lot of fun, there are several issues that, sadly, dampen the overall experience here. For example, your inventory space is annoyingly small, which means that, once you collect materials from distant locations, you essentially have to lumber them back to your burrow before returning to your previous anchor point. In other words, you have to backtrack to progress. And believe me when I say that, despite there being a solid variety of locations to find and explore, there is a lot of backtracking. It isn’t a major issue, though it is one that brings about some level of frustration every once in a blue moon.

To counter all of the above, Winter Burrow does, in all fairness, boast a ton of fantastic audiovisual effects and a beautiful sketchbook aesthetic that’s highly reminiscent of a faithful children’s storybook. Suffice it to say that, thematically, Winter Burrow hits the nail on the head. Moreover, true to its word, it does, in fact, capture an approachable survival-crafting ordeal that is a lot of fun to marvel over. There’s not a lot that I can complain about on that front, to be fair.

Winter Is Coming

Despite the game being coined as a beginner-friendly experience that holds your hand, there are some survival elements to onboard here. For example, the game requires you to stock food, find companions, and brave the wintry conditions in order to establish a foothold in the given climate.

While crafting and foraging form the backbone of Winter Burrow, the added layer of mystery does keep things surprisingly engaging. The story and lore give the game a thoughtful, whimsical tone, making your survival journey feel meaningful rather than purely mechanical. In other words, its gentle pace will likely appeal to players both new to the genre and to those looking for a calm, cozy way to spend an evening.

As I said earlier, Winter Burrow isn’t without its flaws. For example, tasks can become repetitive, and the lack of fast travel means that moving across the map can also feel rather time consuming. It’s not a stressful experience by any means, but managing your survival meters still requires a good amount of patience. At around ten hours long, too, it occasionally feels like you’re caught in a loop performing the same tasks again and again to progress. Not a huge gripe, though it is something that often sullies an otherwise enjoyable tale of woe and wonder.

Verdict

Winter Burrow might not be the coziest survival-crafting game of its kind, though it is one that harbors some genuinely excellent ideas and, above all else, a striking sketchbook aesthetic that is both adorable and visually more-ish. Again, the combat is a little, well, floaty and barebones. That said, where Winter Burrow falls short in its ability to capture an airtight battling system, it often makes up for with a barrel of notable qualities. It isn’t a perfect game by any stretch, but it is one that does just enough to deserve the respect of its target demographic. Could it do with a little extra kindling for the fireplace? Yes. Does it deserve to be given the cold shoulder? No.

If you’re looking for a beginner-friendly crafting game that looks and often feels like Don’t Starve, then you should find just enough here to keep you warm whilst you wait to be whisked away to an alternate burrow. If it’s depth and complexity that you’re desperately craving, however, then you might want to consider prodding a different furnace. We’ll let you decide on that one.