Shelter Reviews

10/10 I AM A TERRIBLE MOTHER

Shelter 1 is one of those rare games that quietly stays with you long after you've finished playing. Taking on the role of a mother badger, you're immediately immersed in a beautifully stylized world, where your only mission is clear and powerful: protect and care for your young. The game’s strength lies in its emotional simplicity. There are no over-complicated mechanics or flashy effects—just the raw, instinctual drive to keep your babies fed, safe, and alive as you guide them through a forest filled with both beauty and danger. The art direction is stunning, using a watercolor-like visual style that gives the entire experience a dreamlike quality. The soundtrack is minimal but moving, perfectly matching the quiet tension and peaceful moments as you travel through meadows, woods, and rivers. 10/10 would recommend !!

[h1]Surviving as an animal mom[/h1] Shelter taps into something ancient... something buried deep in all of us - and gives it a quiet stage. That primal fear, that desperate instinct to protect, hunt, survive — the game doesn’t explain it, it makes you live it. And it’s so clever how it does that without needing dialogue or exposition. From the outside, it looks like a soft watercolor tale but beneath that calm lies a quietly brutal journey. Playing as a badger mother guiding her cubs through a hostile world, the game draws out a kind of primal empathy you rarely feel in games. Every moment spent feeding, hiding, running it isn't just gameplay, it's instinct! And when a cub is lost, it hurts in a quiet, raw, emotional kind of way. That emotional intensity is what makes Shelter so unforgettable. We’ve built a world where many of us don’t experience that kind of existential threat anymore, and Shelter is a humbling reminder of just how precarious life is for so many. That contrast, from the cozy gaming couch to the brutal wilderness of the animal kingdom... hits hard. It’s not just a “sad cute game about animals.” It’s a meditation on survival, instinct, and the natural world we’re part of.

In short, charging 14.99 for a game that can be completed in less than an hour feels extreme. In longer, however, this is a cute game with some great ideas that unfortunately does very little with them. The Good - One of the first games (at least that I am aware of) that set out to replicate what it is like to survive as an animal. - A badger is a great choice for an animal to play as! It is predatory and can hunt small animals, but it still small enough that it can be hunted itself by larger carnivores. It is also omnivorous, offering 'passive' methods of feeding as well. In theory, the ability to burrow would also be a great asset. - The game does a good job of giving the feeling of 'pressure' or 'danger'. The timing of events such as fire, flood, nightfall, and eagle attacks isn't just for show, and poor timing can absolutely lead to the loss of a pup or a game over. The Bad - The game is very linear and scripted. This doesn't have to be a 'bad' thing', but it makes the game feel more like a tech demo than a finished product. The only time you have to worry about predators is when you bump into the designated 'predator' area. As I discuss in the next point, it's not clear that feeding has any mechanical purpose. - The game opted for a minimal hud / minimal dialogue, which in some ways I really like. However, multiple times in the game the lack of sufficient explanation led to issues. To even start the game, you have to carry a plant to a dead pup in your den to revive it. The game does not explain this to you at all. If the pup had been weakly moving or making sounds, it might have been more evident what I was supposed to do. Later, you have to cross a river during a flood, and you get a tool tip with a picture showing that you have to hide behind rocks to avoid the waves. However, what I did not realize was that only rocks with pile of pebbles at their base will do so; if you hide behind an identical boulder with no pebbles, you will lose a pup. Lastly and most importantly, it is not clear if it matters which pups you feed, or if you feed them at all! - It feels like the game really missed a trick by picking a burrowing animal, and having you start in a burrow, but have no ability to dig burrows yourself. - The game was surprisingly buggy. Food getting stuck on pups, pups getting stuck on food, pups getting stuck on each other, pups getting stuck on every piece of terrain, pups freezing and not moving, etc. If this game was under 5 dollars I wouldn't mind as much, but the fact that it costs 14.99 is simply outrageous to me. It has the barebones framework for a great game, but it's far too shallow to feel like more than a proof of concept.