Winter Burrow

Si quieres ver dibujos hechos a mano mientras manejas mecánicas básicas de supervivencia esta bien el juego entonces...

好玩，爱玩。 温馨，漂亮。 建设自己的小家。

A very reluctant "Not Recommended" I was swept away by the beautiful art style, music, and overall whimsical charm that this game presented within the first half hour of playing. Throughout my entire playthrough, there is at least a veneer of the delicate balance between beauty and danger, as shown through little things like the constant reminders of how small you are, and the story touching on the grim and sad realities of living off the land (but it really is just TOUCHING on these subjects). My main gripes with this game is it posits itself as an in depth survival crafting game with an interesting story, and while I think the characters are generally well written, the way its delivered made me genuinely think I was doing something wrong. There are points where all your quest will say is "Talk to X Character," and without any other guidance, you end up prompting their dialogue over and over until the quest progresses (without spoilers: there's even one point in Aunty's questline where the progression takes place over a splash screen with a DESCRIPTION of what you did, and it genuinely feels like half the game was lost to that splash screen alone). It doesn't help that there are only five questlines in the game, and all are very secluded from eachother - at no point are you prompted to travel to the other areas for the character's specific fetch quests (as that's what the quests are) unless it's "Go talk to X characer," but all together, none of the character's stories overlap in any meaningful way until the very end. It ends up with a lot of sitting there spamming their dialogue, and progressing the game in a very stilted and janky way, since all of the equipment upgrades (needed to unlock new areas) are locked behind these quests. I spent a lot of days needing to decide which general section of the map I wanted to do things in, since the game doesn't naturally guide or suggest where the next area might be - which isn't a bad thing, but this isn't entirely an open world game, so SOME direction would have been appreciated. The other big issue with the game is that the survival mechanic is very shallow - the closest comparison you could make is Don't Starve, which is unfortunate since Don't Starve has some of the weirdest but enjoyable survival mechanics in this category of game. Some resources you'll eventually just ignore completely because they're so plentiful, and others you'll be spending hours trying to find since there's no good source for them - they just spawn randomly (eg. wool, AFAIK). Food hardly becomes an issue once you collect enough of it, and if you build even a little bit of furniture for your home to upgrade your base stats, then chances are you won't have TOO many issues exploring the world. There was only one point in the early game where I nearly died because I got horribly lost - which brings me to my last point. The map is horrendous. I know it's probably intended to be 'handmade and vague,' as in not 100% accurate to the topography, but I'd almost say it's better to not use it at all. At best, it's just a bit vague, and at worst it's nonsensical. There are entire areas where the map does not match what you see in game at all - there's points where the map will suggest you should go in one direction to get to the next area, but you actually end up needing to go a completely different way, since this game uses screens with paths between instead of one big open world. If the map was intended to just be suggestive, I think that they should have leaned into putting more whimsical and mysterious things on it like significant landmarks, bodies of water, dangerous wildlife (etc), and gotten rid of the paths completely - or just not have a map at all. All the areas are beautifully designed, and when you travel them enough, you do start to memorise routes (esp. since your footprints remain in the snow, which I think is adorable), so the just barely-not accurate style of the map completely contradicts what might have been something that was supposed to be part of the gameplay. Overall, I did enjoy playing, which is why this is a reluctant "Not Recommend," but for the price it's listed at, I don't think it would be worth it. The game is very short (which I don't find particularly bad), but because the gameplay is so lacking, I think the experience overall ends up being somewhat shallow. It really seems like there was an inspired vision for this, as the art and themes are extremely on point, and there is a consistent theme of perseverance in all of the character's stories which is very sweet, but the immersion gets cut short when you're reminded that you're the one who has to "collect X number of thing" or "craft X Item" in order to progress those stories. In general, it feels like you're the one who's directing the pace of the story, instead of the other way, which really dampens a game that looks like it's going to be a cozy (but also somewhat grim) story-driven experience. If you adore the art, music, and general themes of the game (like I do), then you will still probably enjoy this game, but I don't think it has any replayability value, nor is it going to deliver the story in a completely seamless way. If the devs ever make any more projects like this, I would still be very interested to see what they are like, as there's still a lot of redeemable things about this game to just write it off completely.