Winter Burrow
“Cozy games” – snug, hygge, cute, and providing a sense of security – are rarely at the same time cold survival games, where every minute spent outside the base camp brings a sweet little mouse closer to a grim end in the freezing dark of a hostile environment… Even more rarely do such games remain cute and, moreover, completely accessible to everyone. Regardless of whether your winter is dragging on, or perhaps it’s a hot summer or autumn and you’re longing for a fairy-tale snowy blanket, Winter Burrow will hit the bullseye at (-)10(°C).
Survival games are rarely a good choice for a beginner player – the whole idea of “survival” implies the difficulty of simply keeping your character alive. Although very often visually attractive, sometimes set in a 2D environment and only conventionally reflecting the real difficulties encountered by actual survivalists in the field, games like Don’t Starve, The Escapists, or This War of Mine can give novices a hard time and discourage casual players with their time consumption. Winter Burrow is different, however – it aims rather at telling a story about nostalgia, returning to childhood, rejection and reconciliation, loneliness, building a local community, and simply – about the hardships that ordinary everyday life can entail. Survival elements are used here primarily to emphasize the contrast between how brutal the world can be and how cozy and warm it can also be.
Typical survival games try to hit that sweet spot where the gameplay is still bearable, but already so difficult that the player feels almost first-hand some of the hardships their character faces. The problem is that with this approach, creators can very easily turn entertainment into a tedious ASAP grind, with a constant feeling of shortage and lack of time. I accused The Alters of this, suggesting that some unhealthy corporate culture – so common in the gaming industry – had probably seeped into the game. There is practically no trace of this in Winter Burrow, though, and the only rush – related to the coming of night – is predictable and, after gaining some skill, negligible. The mouse we control knows how much time it can still snoop around outside that day, time does not pass during conversations with NPCs, the collected items make it quite easy to avoid freezing, and even if we happen to turn it into an icy cat dessert, the penalty for tempting fate is relatively low.
The game has a quite clearly defined target audience – despite the drawn graphics straight out of sophisticated children’s books (rather for those children who listened to Mozart before birth, and whose toys from ages 0-5 were 100% sensory and eco-friendly), it is not really a title created with them in mind. The colors are heavily subdued, and the story told in the game is sometimes very dramatic. If you add the still-existing time pressure to this, we can cross little kids off the list. Many teenagers, on the other hand, will definitely find the game boring. No, the target of this game are adults who need a warm, mature story, don’t have too much time or gaming skill, but are tired of reading Harry Potter, the Moomins, or Anne of Green Gables over and over again. In a word – for n00bs and casuals hungry for cozy games, which means many of you!
If any points can be deducted, it’s probably only for the ruthlessness of the ticking clock, the overly limited backpack capacity, and – mainly – for the assumption that everyone already knows some game involving crafting and survival. It’s not a completely wrong assumption, because whether it was Minecraft, its 2D cousin Terraria, the highly praised at every opportunity Stardew Valley, or even something from the Zelda series and many, many others – the concept of combining two elements to get another, and then using it as an ingredient for further, increasingly advanced objects to survive in an equally increasingly hostile environment – most people who end up in the winter forest of Winter Burrow will already be familiar with it. They won’t be surprised by the idea of making yarn out of fur or an axe out of stone and sticks. But playing Winter Burrow with this experience, compared to playing from the perspective of a complete novice holding a controller for the first time, is separated by a chasm. Other games bridge this gap better – without time pressure, with a better tutorial or at least a more intuitive interface, a less linear plot, or even no plot at all, which gives novices an even freer hand and rewards casual players even more for returning after months of a break.
Despite this, for both groups – a solid 8/10. It’s worth snooping around!
Final Izzy Mode Score for Winter Burrow
Casual score: how suitable the game is for casual players – casual players who like a challenge from time to time, but generally just wanna’ have fu-u-n🎵 a few hours a week without stress and just for the fun of playing. The higher the score the more casual-friendly the game.
n00b-o-meter: how suitable the game is for n00b players – new players whose gaming career started and ended with Candy Crush, Tetris or browser games or even never played a game and would like to start. The higher the score the more n00b-friendly the game.
General Izzyness Level: between Izzy Mode, Normal, Hard and Nightmare – how would the title score in the difficulty scale known from games?
