Pine Creek GamesI still remember the first time I saw The Secret of Nimh. After a childhood of watching cartoons about cute, anthropomorphic animals singing and dancing happily, I settled in for what my parents must have believed was another one of those, only to be confronted with the most harrowing movie I’d ever seen at that point in my life. Nothing else has quite matched the shock of that formative movie-watching experience (except for maybe Return to Oz), but it’s certainly been on my mind as I play the adorable-on-the-surface survival game Winter Burrow.“Winter Burrow is a cozy woodland survival game about a mouse returning home to restore their childhood burrow,” reads the game’s description on its Steam page. “Explore, gather resources, craft, knit warm sweaters, bake pies and meet the locals.”And, yes, that’s all there, but it does leave out the capitalistic exploitation, childhood trauma, and constant threat of hypothermia, not to mention the spiders several times your size hunting you down. Winter Burrow may look like a cozy life sim in the vein of Stardew Valley, but it’s got a lot more in common with games like Don’t Starve. You’ll knit cut outfits and decorate your home, sure, but “farming” is limited to growing mushrooms in your basement, and the game spends much more time focused on difficult wilderness survival than the comforts of home.There’s plenty of reason to be fatigued by cozy games these days. Not only are there so many of them they seem to drown out just about every other genre, but they’ve been the subject of a lot of deserved criticism for being shallow escapism at best, or self-centered conservatism at worst. Beginning with your character fleeing the dangerous city to live off the land in his childhood home, Winter Burrow seems at first to fall into all of those traps, but quickly becomes a counterpoint to them instead.There’s coziness to find in Winter Burrow, but it’s hard won. | Pine Creek GamesEarly on we learn that the experience of playing Winter Burrow isn’t going to be quite as cozy as it looks. In charming storybook panels, the game’s intro tells of how your parents moved with you from your country burrow to the big city when you were a child. Seeking a better life, they were instead worked to death in the mines, leaving you to scrape up just enough of whatever Mouse City uses for currency to return to the family home and wait out the long winter with your Aunt Betulina. That is, until an owl scoops her up almost as soon as you meet and you set off to find her yet again.Despite its adorable aesthetics, Winter Burrow is a fairly demanding survival game. At all times, you need to be aware of your body heat and hunger. Get too cold or hungry and your health will quickly start dropping, meaning you need to carry a supply of food and warming drinks on you at all times while exploring. That makes every trip away from home into a potentially fatal one, requiring you to keep a close eye on how far you are from home and whether the supplies you have on hand will safely get you there.The difficulty of surviving winter adds a lot of tension to Winter Burrow. | Pine Creek GamesOn top of that, you don’t even have a map to guide you, leaving you to memorize the snow-covered area around your home or wander desperately to find your way back after an outing. I did plenty of both during my playthrough, and while I was sometimes frustrated by how easily I got lost, it does add a lot of delicious tension when you’re scrambling frantically home, hoping you can make it back before you freeze.At first, the goals you pursue outdoors are simple, mostly revolving around getting your new burrow set up and hunting for Aunt Betulina. Soon, though, you begin to meet other animals waiting out the winter, and things get more complex. An aging squirrel forgetting their own hiding places and a grumpy toad estranged from their child make up some of the first additions to the cast, proving that the darkness in your own story isn’t a fluke. They’ll ask you to gather resources for them, but also to help with larger tasks that will send you much further from home, putting stress on your own ability to survive.It’s clear that Winter Burrow is following the same pattern as The Secret of Nimh, using its cute woodland creatures to tell deceptively mature stories. To some extent, it also pushes against the conservative cozy drive toward nostalgia and self-sufficiency. Your mouse avatar may not yearn for the mines, but the countryside is far from idyllic. And rather than escaping the city to focus on yourself alone, you end up more entangled in the lives of your distant neighbors as your needs grow greater. The only way to survive is to do so together, whether you’re a human and a mouse, and Winter Burrow understanding that makes it all the more compelling.Winter Burrow is available now on Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and PC.