Life can sometimes feel like a grind, a neverending series of tasks and jobs that must be completed to a rigid schedule. We all feel run down, at times, by this hamster-wheel-like repetition of drudgery. Housework alone is more than enough to keep most of us scurrying around after our tails all day long. It’s therefore rather fascinating from a psychological point of view that there are several very popular genres of video games that electronically replicate these very patterns from our busy workaday lives. I pondered why these games draw so many people in as I worked my way through the delightful, albeit rather grindy, storybook-inspired Winter Burrow.
Perhaps the familiarity, and consequent cosiness, of repeating the toil of our lives in beautiful, graspable worlds, which are easier to control than our chaotic real lives, is part of what draws us into cleaning, crafting and building our leisure time away in these types of games. They become homes away from home, where we can replicate the soothing rhythms of habit. Home is the central theme of Winter Burrow, and its gameplay runs on repetition.
You play as an anthropomorphic mouse who, after the death of their parents in the cruel and hostile city, returns to their dilapidated childhood home in the equally cruel forest. You must rebuild your parents’ burrow and reacquaint yourself with your Aunt Betulina – a perfect storybook name if ever I heard one. You spend most of your time gathering resources and crafting tools and furniture (lots of furniture), as well as making warm clothes to wrap yourself up in as you search the forest floor for supplies. (By the way, the knitting animation is an absolute delight. We need more knitting in games. You’ll also need to cook the meals (there are many recipes to discover) that you’ll desperately need to sustain your health and energy.
The gorgeous picture book art style is cosy and inviting. It’s winter in the forest. The snowy landscapes are picturesque: ghostly pine trees reflected in the glassy ice, snow drifts telling of pitiless storms, and every branch in the wintery forest heavy with its load of snow. But the freezing cold weather soon becomes your mortal enemy. Indeed, the gameplay and associated systems seek to replicate, albeit in a manageable form, the fight for survival in a state of nature. Life is not easy for an orphaned young mouse fresh from the city.
Although this is certainly not a hardcore survival game (it’s no Rain World), it’s perhaps slightly more challenging than the charming art style might lead you to believe. Keeping warm when traversing the wintry forest and getting home to the safety of the burrow before the cold night sets in can turn into a tricky game of risk and reward, especially as you also have to keep a close eye on your hunger, health and stamina meters. However, you are not harshly punished for passing out from the cold; you simply find yourself back in the burrow, and once you’re warm again, you can venture back out to reclaim your lost resources.
Perhaps the trickiest, and for me the most frustrating, element of the game is the inventory management. As you’d expect in a survival crafting game, even of the -lite variety, this is a key system in the game. You start with a rather small backpack, and juggling and stacking items quickly becomes essential, as is discarding items to free up space. This lack of space is sometimes a drag, interfering with the flow of collecting resources. The balance doesn’t feel quite right. This is doubly frustrating when you discover that building extra storage cabinets in your burrow doesn’t actually give you more inventory space. As with most of the furniture you build, it’s merely aesthetic.
The crafting loop can also sometimes be tiresome – in order to build, cook or knit something, you first must get x, y and z items, as you’d expect – but as with all crafting games, the tediousness or otherwise of making yet another foray out to look for resources depends on how much you like being in that particular world and how engaged you are in the story and characters.
It’s here that Winter Burrow fell rather short for me. I found the mouse protagonist’s animal neighbours, for whom you have to do a variety of busy work, dull and uninteresting, and their dialogue a little cringey and annoying. It seems the writers were aiming for charmingly ironic in terms of tone, which is a hard style to pull off. I certainly couldn’t connect with their wandering monologues and ended up skipping through most of them, which is a problem since they contain the seeds of the storytelling.
This relative lack of interest in the narrative and characters made the crafting and endless search for resources – and the management of that infuriating inventory – much less compelling. Going round and round the forest looking for that one resource you so desperately need to advance the game – I’m referring to you, flint – was painfully frustrating and repetitive as heck. And there’s no map. Admittedly, it’s not a huge world, and I did eventually get to know all the routes through the forest, but early on navigation was definitely a problem.
There’s also danger lurking in the forest; not all the animals are your friend (thank goodness). There’s very basic melee combat: hit once or twice, back off to regain stamina, then walk back in for a few more hits. It feels tacked on and is often irritating when you just want to gather your resources. I also got backed into awkward corners a few times, from which I couldn’t escape. I wonder if the game could have worked without combat?
And yet despite all these issues, the game certainly has many charming elements. Sure, you have to retrace your steps again and again, but the mouse protagonist’s plodding gait is so lovely, and the trails left by their footprints in the snow often made me smile. The heavy breathing of the protagonist when they’re working and their stamina starts to give out adds a lovely touch of fragility, and the sense of fear you get when confronted by hostile animals is palpable. It made me think of Robert Burns’ poem ‘To a Mouse’. You really do want to protect your ‘sleek, cowering, timorous’ wee mouse buddy. Likewise, the repetitive nature of the traversal is offset somewhat by the beautiful environments, and the whimsical music is a lovely accompaniment to your ramblings. The theme of home – the place where we feel safe, cosy and secure – is also relatively well depicted and enacted in the gameplay. It’s always a relief to make it safe and sound back to the burrow as night closes in.
