Review: Life Sim Winter Burrow Makes Us a Tiny Mouse in a Cold World

Did you grow up with cute animal movies like The Secret of NIMH and Watership Down that pulled no punches when it came to serious subjects? Do you also like games that offers comforting routines and life sim elements? Well, Winter Burrow ticks all of those boxes by presenting us with a life sim about a young mouse who’s all alone in the world and trying to survive. While some pacing and design elements do get a little frustrating if you’re aware of how these types of titles go, it’s adorable, a little bit dark, and encourages “one more day” sorts of gameplay sessions.

You’re a tiny mouse. You grew up in a burrow in the woods. Life was harsh and meant facing the elements to survive, but your family was together! Your parents headed with you to the city in search of a better life. However, that led to the two of them working themselves to death. With urban life unaffordable and you all alone, you return to the now dilapidated burrow to attempt to see if surviving in the woods alone might be better after all. 

As the name suggests, it’s the coldest season of the year in Winter Burrow, so your first priority when getting situated in this life sim is getting the mouse’s burrow in the tree livable. Your four stats constantly displayed in the lower left corner are your mouse’s health, hunger, temperature, and stamina. Health can go down if you are attacked by enemies like beetles, you start starving, or you let your temperature get down to zero when outside too long. (Ice will form at the edges of the screen like on a windowpane when this happens, and a reddish tint can signal disaster.) Stamina goes down when you run or use tools like an axe, pickaxe, or shovel. Your goal is to venture out each day in occasional spurts to gather materials and accomplish certain goals.

This means collecting materials and ingredients. In the initial area, you’ll find twigs that could be combined with mushrooms to make a snack, kill beetles to make a roast out of their meat, or find beechnuts that could be turned into a beechnut biscuit. The food you chop from logs could be turned into planks for furniture. Cutting down grass and finding tufts of fur can become cloth for clothing and shoes. Useful furniture, like beds or storage boxes, can be placed. Other materials can be used to repair parts of the burrow like the stove, workbench, sitting area, and basement mushroom garden. It’s essentially a situation in which you pick away at certain tasks to gain clothing and tools that make it easier for your to head into additional areas and accomplish more so you aren’t just surviving, but thriving.  

While I do appreciate that some aspects of Winter Burrow are designed to emphasize the survival elements of this life sim, it feels in desperate need of some quality of life additions or pacing patches. For example, unlike many crafting and life sims, you don’t get all your basic tools right away. You’ll spend quite a bit of time getting by with only an axe, needing to wait on a shovel and pickaxe. Likewise, it takes quite a bit of time to get more backpack space, as initially you only have the five spaces in your hotbar and then four slots in your bag. Key items like a, well, key? That also takes up a slot in your very limited bag. When watering mushrooms in the cellar “garden,” there’s no visual indication which plot was watered. I get that the limitations are designed to make you think critically about how much you can accomplish before the cold gets to your character or light runs out. But at the same time, we get access to warming drinks that would make it possible to explore into other regions of the map way before we get access to a bag that is large enough to actually make that kind of gathering mission worthwhile.

I also happened upon some things that might be bugs? When you do get access to the shovel, it will note its attack as being 10. But when I tried to use it to attack a beetle instead of the axe… it did no damage? (Fortunately, it didn’t encourage aggro from the beetles in the area around the burrow, so I didn’t put the mouse in danger.) Mushrooms are supposed to also drop the spores you can use to plant in your basement, but once I unlocked it I only got one additional spores drop after about four hours. 

While those elements can get a little cumbersome, the tone in Winter Burrow is impeccable. It can go from calm and serene to darkly depressing in an instant. Like the aforementioned animals in Watership Down and The Secret of NIMH, life is absolutely not easy for the mice and creatures in the forest. We start with two deaths and a dilapidated home, then often see hope snatched away with the fear of more death and despair. At the same time, it’s compelling in a way that makes you want to keep pushing forward in the hope things will get better for this little rodent with your help. Especially since it all looks so charming and cute.

While Winter Burrow doesn’t shy away from the darker sides of survival games, it’s also a charming and calming anthropomorphic mouse life sim. Yes, trying to get by in a big, cold world when you’re a teeny, tiny mouse with very little is tough! But if you take your time, plot out a reliable routine, and keep pushing forward, you might be okay. 

Winter Burrow is available for the Switch and PC.