Shelter (PC)
Video games allow us to experience the impossible, and so when we find ourselves playing as an animal in one, they too are often doing incredible things like a hedgehog moving faster than the speed of sound or a dolphin fighting back an alien invasion. However, Shelter is a far more down to earth experience, one that lets the human player assume the simple role of a mother badger heading out into the wild to find a new home for herself and her children. The only enemy is the natural world and its many trials, and while we definitely get to see a series of highlights in this short adventure, this intimate tale is still devoted to the idea that this fight for survival is close to what an animal could possibly see out in the wild.
When the game begins, the mother badger finds herself with five cubs, one immediately weakened from hunger as a way of teaching the player the consequence for not tending to their new virtual children well. The game uses no words to speak to the player during the game and instead relying on a few instructive images appearing at times to allow them to understand new gameplay mechanics, but this opening immediately introduces the main stakes for your adventure. You are a fully grown and capable badger, but your little kits are helpless, depending on your foraging skills for food and your strength for protection when predators are lurking about.
As your quest for adequate food takes you away from the den, you’ll luckily find the world is flush with vegetation you can easily pluck from the dirt and feed to your children. Each piece of vegetation will only feed one child, and the size of the food can determine how well it fills up their bellies. You can knock into trees to shake loose fruit, dig up veggies, and pluck blossoms, the babies either running naturally to it or the player able to determine how the new food item is distributed. Your babies will start to grey out when they’ve gone too long without a meal, which is an unfortunate design decision because the game’s attempt to make each of your children look unique means the fur color of some of them makes it hard to tell if they’re starting to get hungry or not. If you’re attentive enough in your foraging you can keep them well fed regardless of the difficult readability, and there are other options to provide food as well. Rats, frogs, and even foxes can be chased down and killed for a food source, the babies even able to take multiple meat portions from larger prey.
A lot of your time in Shelter is the gradual push forward in search of a new home, the player meant to take small breaks to gather some food for their offspring. This survival element isn’t pushed as hard as you might expect due to the land’s generosity, but maintaining your full litter of five throughout the adventure certainly has its trials. Each segment of the story introduces some new danger that can threaten to claim one of the baby’s lives in an instant if you aren’t attentive and reactive. A hawk flies overhead at multiple points, the player needing to lead their little family between patches of grass they can hide in to avoid a child being scooped up as a meal. The badger family needs to cross a river a few times, the current picking up and threatening to whisk your children away. There’s even a tense segment at night where letting your children out of sight will let the creatures hiding in the darkness claim them, so while the mother badger is safe for most of this journey, the survival of her children is the real measure of your success.
Once a child is lost, they are gone unless you want to restart your entire adventure. When a child is lost, it can really feel like you failed them as a mother, and if you end up starting to grow attached to your litter and even start to give them names, you can definitely set yourself up to be wounded by the unfortunate fate of one of your kits. There is nothing that truly punishes you for losing that child, and in a dark sort of way the game becomes easier with each one lost, but that sound of a badger baby being snatched up has an emotional toll, and the fact it makes you cling closer to the children you still have can set you up for further heartbreak later down the line.
Sadly, while it is easy to immerse yourself into the intended mindset of this adventure at times, Shelter can break you out of it as well. This is through no fault of the art style despite its interesting choice of large polygons and textures that tend to emphasize interesting color tones for an area over fidelity, although at points this art direction can bother the eyes like the opening in your initial den where the hazy appearance makes it seem like your burrow is being sprayed with gas despite no humans appearing in the game whatsoever. A few of the more video game style concessions are easy to overlook as well, the hawk’s shadow clearly being a gameplay mechanic but making up for the fact we aren’t literally viewing the action through the mother’s eyes that would allow her to track the predator properly. Instead, the hiccups in immersion come from simple errors in animation, AI pathfinding, and other technical problems. Your children usually chase after you rather intelligently and you can call for their attention with a little bark, but the fact so many trials in your journey involve crossing at the right time, losing a baby badger because it decided to run its face straight into a rock it doesn’t realize is there completely removes the idea this is a natural living creature. Granting a baby some food while it’s too close will have the food drop in the middle of its body and make the baby rotate in place as well, and what’s worse, hazards seem inconsistent on if they’ll prove lethal or not. The water current is especially inconsistent, sometimes washing over your babies and simply dowsing them while other times whisking them down river when it looked safer than the times you all ended up drenched instead. Naturally you would want to avoid the current altogether, but waiting on five little badgers to hopefully follow during the right time window leads to inconsistencies on if they’ll actually cross or if they’ll glitch out and end up walking on top of a log you are not meant to reach.
This can definitely lead to the player being yanked out of the game’s immersive setting and hurt the message that it’s trying to portray. Nature can be cruel and random yes, and having your young badgers run off into the dark when a sound spooks them and only four come back is a harsh reminder of how rough such lives can be in real life. However, seeing your babies behave like video game objects with faulty programming makes the death of one feel entirely separate from this intended message, because no hawk in real life has acquired a meal by lucking out on a rotating badger clipping through level geometry. If you’re lucky, the mechanical flaws won’t leave a mark on your adventure, but without them the game isn’t particularly demanding all the same. It’s a rather linear path forward that you break from for the mild survival elements, your direct threats telegraphed pretty well in advance and some like the forest fire not nearly as dangerous as you’d expect. This short game is expecting you to do a lot of the mental legwork to get you invested in this adventure, and while baby badgers are inherently cute, especially when they get so excited at the sight of something they can eat, the game could do with a few moments to add personality to them beyond food consumption machines. A scene of them playing or even just a night spent huddled in a burrow for warmth would go a long way in helping to give life to these creatures while also allowing you to feel the losses more when the cast ends up trimmed down by tragedy.
Shelter does have one additional mode you can play that goes for a different approach than the linear quest of the main game. Nurture leans much harder into the life sim elements briefly touched upon with the main game’s survival mechanics, the focus now shifted to the player assuming the role of a different badger mother after her kits are born. Setting out of your den, you gather food and bring it back to your offspring, there being no predators or hazards to worry about in this secondary mode. Instead, the threat of starvation is the only thing hanging over the player’s head as they play, with Nurture actually being a mode you are meant to play across multiple real life days. When you visit your cubs each day, they’ll be ready to eat, the world refreshed with new food for you to forage for. So long as you feed them each and every real world day they’ll grow up over time, Nurture mode helping you watch them grow over time into adults who eventually must set off and start their own lives. The game boils down this growth period to about a month and you only need to check on them once per day to keep them well fed, but the lack of danger, inability to have meaningful interaction with your young outside of feeding time, and the only requirement being making sure each one gets a bit of food daily means Shelter’s Nurture mode can feel more like you are pouring flakes in a fish tank rather than truly raising mammalian young. It might seize on certain players emotionally to have this very basic child-rearing option, but once more we butt into the issue that Shelter is both trying to be a realistic take on the dangers a mother badger can experience while lacking the mechanical complexity or solid technical design to deliver on this beyond the basics.
THE VERDICT: Despite an art direction that feels intentionally unnatural, Shelter was on the cusp of creating an emotional tale of parenthood and loss told only through the natural life of a mother badger searching for a new home for her cubs. The impartiality of nature when it comes to who lives and dies can be felt when a baby is lost to a simple slip-up in a dangerous moment, but while it puts a decent selection of hazards in your path during this short adventure, it struggles to pack its intended punch. Most of your time is spent with the fairly easy task of keeping your litter fed, with Nurture mode making this even more simplistic beyond the need to visit the game each day. Technical issues can lead to some losses feeling outside your control, but while it certainly feels like Shelter wants to evoke more emotion than it puts the effort into earning, there is still enough here and a conciseness to most of the experience that it can still be worth dabbling in this bittersweet window into the natural world.
And so, I give Shelter for PC…
An OKAY rating. Immersion is definitely the determining factor on how individual players will react to the events of Shelter. Some people will easily slip into the mother badger role and feel heartbreak if a kit meets an untimely end, but others might find it difficult to ignore the artificial behaviors of the cubs, especially as they struggle with environmental collision or their AI briefly goes on the fritz. The main story segment puts a few interesting road bumps into the adventure that keep you moving to fresh situations, the natural setting undergoing lighting and color changes in addition to its new dangers so that the tent pole moments where the children are at stake are memorable and unique. However, the time between these is the rather dry process of picking vegetables or knocking fruit from trees, survival more about not getting bored by the gathering process rather than involving difficult decisions. Nurture mode really does strip things down too far and is only really going to entertain people who read the mode’s concept and loved the idea of being a mother badger with few responsibilities, but the main adventure can at least set up some moments that can properly convey the game’s messages. You must soldier on after a loss for the sake of the other children, nature won’t even give newborns preferential treatment, and while you may easily make your way through one day, another you are struggling to get by as something stronger threatens to end your existence. There is certainly kindling for strong emotional reactions here, but it’s also not conveying as deep a message as it might be trying to achieve, Shelter feeling like it needs a greater space to explore its ideas so they aren’t lost to technical constraints or an all too short adventure where it can’t flesh out its concepts fully.
Shelter may frustrate a bit when its artificiality rears its head, but by keeping its head low to the ground with a naturalistic story, it still provides a video game experience that can prove intriguing. Its heavily reliance on immersion provides moments where you feel a loss personally, but it also means that something that shatters the illusion of this being a window into the life of realistic animals really starts showing how simplistic Shelter is on the whole. A grounded tale about a mother badger trying to keep her cubs alive was already going to turn away some audiences, but the kind of players that are enticed by this concept might still find enough to chew on both in how the adventure plays and how it executes on its premise.