Game Review: Winter Burrow

Winter Burrow is a 2-D, isometric survival cozy game developed by Denmark-based studio Pine Creek Games and published by Noodlecake Studios. Released on November 2025 across PC, Nintendo Switch and Xbox consoles, the indie game aggregated a rather low average of 69 on OpenCritic.  Despite a less-than-ideal critical average, early sales indicators I’ve found from sources online seem to show the game is performing quite well across the core console markets. As winter fully settles its cold coat over the final month of 2025, I figured with my Game Pass subscription reactivated that now would be a good time to give the game a whirl and see how it fares.

The narrative of Winter Burrow follows a small mouse who after spending many years in the big city moves back to their family home in the woods.  After being away for so long, the little fellow is shocked to find their old woodland home in disrepair as the cold seasons have worn it away throughout the years.  After fixing the house to livable standards, the young mouse sets out to visit their auntie who chose to stay in the burrow all those years back while his parents decided to leave. Happy to see one another, the auntie and mouse begin to support each other as the mouse learns to brave the dangerous winter surroundings to try and help out the fellow burrow animals.  It’s soon made apparent however that the cold isn’t the only danger that prowl in the woods, and it’s up to our brave little mouse to fight to survive as they seek to build back up their old home.

As far as the narratives goes, it’s pretty sweet and charming tale which smartly encompasses the tone and vibe of the old children’s stories it’s clearly pulling inspiration from.  It’s primary focus on a small mouse returning home and building a life for themselves in their wintery abode is simple yet endearing in a lot of respects.  What helps is the game’s selection of supporting characters too, they each have their own personal sub-plots you can help them with which helps define their presence in this world substantially. The main plot and smaller character side plots all work to project the environments harsh conditions but highlights how key those intimate relations are to helping each other survive. It’s a sweet plot all things considered.

As for gameplay, there’s a fair bit of good and bad elements to address. In terms of exploration and questing, the game does struggle somewhat to offer a meaningful way to track your progress.  There’s a quest log in place but often at times the objectives can be vary vague and there’s no effort to point the player in the right direction to find key items.  The map is fairly large and with the added survival elements, it makes wasting times backtracking all over quite tedious upon reflection.  I’m not asking to be hand-held but I feel the vague approach to the quest system can make your time in Winter Burrow more stressful than it needs to be.

Besides the quest system however, the exploratory portion of the game ticks a lot of key survival/crafting game boxes.  You’ll start out with limited equipment and inventory space, and you’ll only be able to collect basic resources. A lot of the mid to late game areas will be smartly locked off from you until you progress the story and craft better gear to fight the cold and get other obstacles.  It’s a smart and well-layered progression system which allows you to feel your skill and capabilities develop as you explore more of the map.  It helps that each area has a distinct design to its environment and obstacles, it makes recognizing each of the key areas a lot easier.  On the whole as well, the key aim to reflect a story book design in its visual layout makes exploring it feel fun and memorable.

The crafting and customizing portion of the game is fairly implemented too, though I do feel it lacks certain depth behind its mechanics at times.  If you’ve played Minecraft, Rust or any other survival game, it follows the same core approach, but its ingenuity is limited in the scope of its function.  Resources you collect can be used to craft better gear or furniture for your house, but it’s limited to a fair extent.  You’ll be able to craft a lot of the key items easy enough and besides small areas you can decorate, you’ll feel you’ve hit the full extent of this system fairly quickly.

Visually the game perfectly encapsulates the art style of those old children story books it’s basing itself off.  The explorable areas, the UI, the character and enemy designs, they all realize that warm and inviting imagery that made reading those books in our youth so captivating.  I think one of the games key positives is that its imagery does a fantastic job reflecting the cozy vibe behind it. Andreas Busk does a wonderful job with the soundtrack too, it layers the winter world with a sweet and melancholic aura so well.

I think as far as cozy survival games go, Winter Burrow does a decent job defining itself better than most do.  It’s a fairly saturated genre if you really think about it, so it’s a notable testament that the game is able to do so much to stand out.  I think a lot of that is down to the visual design of the game though as I feel what lets the game down somewhat is its lack of scope and functionality.  As you progress through the game it becomes more and more noticeable how hollow its gameplay elements turn out to be and that sadly holds the game back for me.