After years of refinement, crafting and survival games have developed a pretty effective formula: you’re taken to a place where you collect sticks, you use the sticks to build an axe, you use the axe to chop down trees, and soon you’re building an entire shelter, moving up the tech tree, crafting increasingly complex equipment, and mastering the wilderness around you.

Winter Burrow doesn’t deviate from that formula – at least not for the first 20 minutes. But while it feels very similar to other survival games, most notably Don’t Starve, its tone and approach set it apart. Winter Burrow applies a cozy aesthetic to its survival, combining the sense of danger with the feeling that what you’re building isn’t a shelter to keep you alive, but a home.

I played a short demo of Winter Burrow at Xbox’s Gamescom event in Los Angeles, which gave me a quick look at the game from the start. The demo kicked off with a short cutscene introducing the story of an anthropomorphic mouse embarking on a new life. The mouse fondly remembers his old home, the Burrow, but when he was a child, he and his family moved away to find work in the city, leaving him in the care of his aunt. His parents worked in the city’s mines for years before they both died. Fed up of that life, the mouse returned to his old home, only to find it in a run-down state and his aunt missing.

From this setup, you set to work restoring the burrow. Winter Burrow’s initial gameplay is fairly standard for the genre: you’ll need to gather sticks and grass to build a fire, repair a workbench, and fix an armchair. At the start, the game consists of a series of short forays into the burrow’s surroundings to gather supplies, before bringing them back on trucks to craft equipment and upgrades. And as usual, you’ll also manage meters like hunger, exhaustion, and temperature.

Even in its run-down state, the Burrow gives the impression that it would be a nice place to live with a little sprucing up, and that’s reinforced by Winter Burrow’s fairytale art style and its cute mouse protagonist. The game generally exudes a relaxed vibe, especially when you’re in the Burrow and doing things like sitting in your armchair. The armchair is actually your crafting facility for making new clothes that will keep you warmer and give you more protection, but in the animation for making these clothes, your mouse is sitting by the fire knitting, a perfect illustration of Winter Burrow’s cozy approach.

However, “cozy” doesn’t mean the game excludes the usual stresses of a survival game. Although I only played for 20 minutes, I was confronted with some harsh realities as I wandered around trying to find eight bundles of grass to craft a rope or enough pieces of wood to build a few planks. The key word in the name Winter Burrow is “winter,” and when you return to your childhood home, it’s snowy and freezing outside. The clothes you start off wearing aren’t enough to protect you from the cold for long, and even with the sweater, pants, and hat I knitted myself early on, the creeping cold could quickly turn deadly.

Additionally, there is no map in Winter Burrow, at least not in the early game. Everything is covered in snow, so the landscape has few landmarks, and even though I didn’t stray far from the burrow, I was very easily lost. The only reliable way to find your way home is to follow your own footprints or just memorize the landscape. If you don’t make it back before your temperature gauge runs out, you’ll freeze and die, and anything you’re carrying will fall back where you fell.

The cold is surprisingly dangerous and definitely stressful. I was busy searching for the supplies I needed and didn’t realize how far the temperature gauge had dropped until frost started forming around the edges of the screen. At this point, I had no idea how to get back to the burrow. While I encountered a few large, dangerous bugs in this first area, the real danger was the weather. Once I succumbed to it, the normal gameplay loop of running off to find the stuff I needed before returning home became much more oppressive. Winter Burrow is a cute, yet serious game.

My demo ended shortly after starting, as I was repairing a bridge to cross a gap and explore a new area. I didn’t get far into Winter Burrow, but I did encounter a few other animals, both of which seemed friendly and would likely hand out side quests in the near future. While there were a few hostile bugs, I got the feeling that most of the conflict in Winter Burrow will come from braving the elements without many other hostile characters.

If there was a downside to Winter Burrow, it was that this first look relied very heavily on the same sort of formula that’s present in most similar games. I found myself spending a lot of time looking for another log or tuft of grass because I just needed a few more resources before I could craft the thing I needed to move on. Your bags fill up quickly, so in addition to paying attention to your food and temperature, you also need to manage your inventory by throwing stuff into a box in the burrow. These elements aren’t bad on the outside, but at this point they’re pretty routine, and it feels like the experience of Winter Burrow involves a lot of moments where you wish you could keep going but have to stop to do things like make room in your bag or run back to the burrow and warm up before you can move on.

With most survival games, however, the experience becomes more engaging once you get past the early game and can see what there is to offer when you’re not busy trying to stay alive until the next day. My first look at Winter Burrow didn’t allow me to see what was coming next, but the art style, music, and overall soft and inviting feel of the game piqued my curiosity. Winter Burrow retains the core ideas of the survival genre and some of the ways it challenges players, but takes an overall less oppressive approach, and I’m excited to see where that approach goes.

Winter Burrow will be released in early 2025 for PC, Xbox Series X|S and Xbox One as well as Game Pass.