After years of refinement, crafting and survival games have developed a pretty effective formula: You're dropped into a place where you gather sticks, you use the sticks to make an axe, the axe lets you cut down trees, and before long, you're making a whole shelter and advancing up a tech tree and making more and more complex gear, mastering the wilderness around you.

Winter Burrow doesn't stray from that formula--at least, not in its first 20 minutes. But while it feels very similar to other survival games, most notably Don't Starve, it sets itself apart through its tone and approach. Winter Burrow applies a cozy aesthetic to its survival, combining the feeling of danger with a sense 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 its start. A short cutscene started the demo, setting up the story that follows an anthropomorphic mouse setting off for a new life. The mouse remembers his old home, the burrow, with fondness, but he and his family moved away to find work in the city when he was a child, leaving it in the care of his aunt. His parents worked the city's mines for years before they both died, and fed up with that life, the mouse heads back to his old home, only to find it in disrepair and his aunt missing.