Game Review: Winter Burrow
Winter Burrow is cute and has a great visual style, but falls just a little short in Quality of Life features and depth of features.
The ultimate question that Winter Burrow asks is whether or not style is enough to make a game a standout experience in a crowded indie game environment. It looks great, runs smoothly, and has a great storybook quality to it that makes it memorable, but the gameplay is where Winter Burrow ends up faltering.
The general conceit of Winter Burrow is that you’re a mouse who moves back to his childhood home in a tree stump. It’s a cozy crafting survival game where you go out, kill bugs, collect resources for food, knit, bake, and make cute furniture. Ultimately, if you’ve played one crafting game, you’ve played them all so the gameplay will mirror whatever you’ve played before with minimal deviation.
This is kind of the entire problem with this game. It’s short, the world is not very big, and the crafting options are minimal, which is problematic for a game that entirely sells as a vehicle to live out life as a mouse living in a little stump house. You can knit, but there aren’t enough options for you to knit to make this a mechanic to keep returning to. The same goes for baking where there aren’t enough options of food to make, partially because of the limited resource variety.
Probably the weirdest flip of this dynamic comes from the furniture in the house, a space that is incredibly small, but also has a ton of various options and materials available to craft the same 9 functional piece of furniture just with different aesthetics. The house is so small, why do we need so many variations of couch or end table when this would have been better served by variety in the clothing options or the food?
The other key issue with the game is the exploration aspect. You do need to explore the world to find materials so you can do all the crafting and progress the story, but the exploring can feel more annoying than not, especially as the game goes on and more areas unlock. The lack of a map makes exploration tedious at times, especially as you have to traverse a map that gets increasingly large as more of the world unlocks.
As a singular gameplay experience, Winter Burrow is a ton of fun, has a lot of heart, and is worth the initial playthrough. The reason why I cannot say it is a five-star experience at this point is that, as a survival crafting game, it is lacking in content to keep the player engaged beyond completing the main narrative. The crafting, baking, and knitting selections are limited and the exploration is annoying if there isn't a goal in mind. Maybe this game will be another Stardew Valley or No Man's Sky where it will continue to get free updates in the future to expand the offerings, but in the current form it's a four out of five.
★★★★
