A new family friendly survival game for Nintendo Switch and Game Pass challenges you to live through a freezing midwinter as a lowly mouse.

By their very nature, survival games can be quite dark, with your character usually starting by eking out a bare bones subsistence, your primary driver often being simply finding food. As you progress, and supply lines come together, you can move onto more interesting and complex goals. In Subnautica, that was base building and exploration, in Rust it was base building and defending yourself against murderous fellow survivors.

Then there’s Minecraft, which made the process of survival fun and colourful. While Winter Burrow doesn’t have any bright colours, it’s also a family friendly survival game, and therefore one where no matter what happens, nothing gets too gruesome. It’s not without its moments of darkness though, including its set-up, where your mouse hero’s parents die in a rodent metropolis, sending him back to their now dilapidated woodland home, where he sincerely hopes his Aunt Betulina will be waiting.

When you get there, your aunt’s nowhere to be found and your partially caved-in house is in need of urgent repair work. The first order of business is to make yourself a tiny makeshift axe so you can chop down twigs and fallen branches to build a fire. You’ll also need to find food, which can be anything from mushrooms to windfall elderberries, which along with everything else are frozen solid by the icy snows of winter.

Once you’re warm and have rudimentary shelter, it’s time to begin reconstruction efforts. To assist in that your cosy tree stump home comes with a crafting bench and, once you’ve repaired it, an armchair where you can sit and knit, producing useful rope along with a warmer outfit to wear. That proves to be essential, because as soon as you leave your front door your body temperature steadily decreases.

When it drops to the halfway point, frost appears around the edges of the screen, which gradually encroaches further into your vision, until your body heat is fully dissipated, at which point your health bar starts dropping. It’s then urgent that you find your way back to your burrow before you die of hypothermia, with a night’s sleep fully restoring your health.

That doesn’t conflict too much with general survival, because night exploration is initially out of the question – your body temperature plummeting so quickly it’s untenable. Not that your daytime meanderings are exactly straightforward, because even once you’ve scavenged enough material to make a cosy hat, shirt, and trousers, and crafted a set of mouse scale snow shoes, you still don’t have long before you start to freeze.

Eating food helps. The mushrooms you forage from the forest floor give your hunger bar a small bump in the right direction, and you can get a bigger boost by cooking them on your stove; once you’ve rebuilt it, what’s even better is Aunt Betulina’s pies, which provide a range of other temporary buffs. Although, for reasons we won’t spoil, it might be best not to get too used to them.

Developed by Danish studio River Creek, Winter Burrow looks like a hand-illustrated children’s book, its imagery charming and realistic. Your mouse leaves small footprints in the snow, which comes in handy when it’s time to retrace your steps, because there’s no map, and while lovely to look at it’s not always obvious where you can and can’t walk, its signposting subtle or often absent.

That can be stressful when you’re about to freeze to death, or if you’ve wandered a long way from your front door without enough provisions for the journey. That’s not so unusual, because when you start the game you have a paltry nine inventory slots, and three of those are taken up by your axe, shovel, and pick axe, all of which are essential for scavenging. And that’s before you’ve packed a snack, which can also prove important for survival.

Knitting is an important survival skill (Noodlecake)

It’s possible to bring pre-crafted kindling with you, so you can light bonfires in wayside fireplaces and warm yourself up in emergencies, but even once your inventory’s been expanded using a hand-knitted backpack or two, its slots remain precious. We certainly never bothered bringing kindling with us, despite unlocking the further ability to start a fire anywhere, with the lack of space easily outweighing the modest safety net it provides.

Winter Burrow includes a hint of Metroidvania, so as you acquire crafting recipes for better equipment, by doing favours for the woodland animals you meet, you’ll find access to the forest extending accordingly. Smashed boulders or newly cleared roads open paths that had previously been unavailable. In those new areas you’ll start to find aggressive biting ants and more complex scenery, that can be tricky to find your way out of unless you pay particular attention to landmarks on your way in.

You’ll also come to lament your mouse’s puny stamina bar, which expires after a few chops with your axe or just a few seconds of running. It may be in keeping with his diminutive stature, but it does mean everything takes longer than you’d like, which is especially true when your body temperature’s getting dangerously low and you’re a long way from home.

In spite of its pretty visuals, you can’t escape the feeling its balance isn’t quite right. You get cold and hungry too quickly, and while certain foods add to your defence or make stamina drop less precipitously, their effects are small, don’t last long, and your inventory’s so limited that you rarely want to bring extraneous items. It makes managing exploration more fraught and fiddly than it needs to be.

The animals you meet all have distinctive personalities, and it may be the only game we’ve ever played with a ‘Yes, please’ button to confirm you want to save and quit, but Winter Burrow could have done with more polish to make its gameplay live up to the high bar set by its art department.

Formats: Xbox Series X/S (reviewed), Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC
Price: £17.59*
Publisher: Noodlecake
Developer: Pine Creek Games
Release Date: 12th November 2025
Age Rating: 7

*available on Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass from day one

It’s even worse for mouses (Noodlecake)

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