Shelter 2 (PC)
After playing the original Shelter with its emphasis on the cruel realities of nature and the kinds of danger a traveling badger and her babies could face, it was easy to imagine how a sequel could break away from that game’s linear structure to better simulate the unpredictability of an animal’s desperate struggle for survival. The design of the original Shelter allowed for it to be punctuated by scripted events and diverse dangers though, although the actual care for your cubs was rather tedious because foraging for food is rarely difficult. Shelter 2 should have kept the successes and drawbacks of the original Shelter in mind when creating this follow-up title, but the route it went with its more open world design wasn’t quite what I expected.
Shelter 2 has the player play as a lynx mother who is just about ready to give birth to her litter. The game begins with a scripted chase through the woods as she outruns wolves and a rather odd supernatural segment where she follows floating stars to a safe den, and the intrusion of such surreal elements in a game otherwise hinging on realism will be featured again late in your journey as well. However, once the mother lynx settles down in her cosmically ordained den, she gives birth to four kittens, and in a wise move to lead to some immediate attachment, Shelter 2 has you pick names for these distinctly colored cubs. While the mother is locked into the name Inna, you are immediately instructed to give these kittens some names to build up some inherent attachment. The rest of your adventure in Shelter 2 will be about assuring the survival of this tiny pack after all, with the death of these cubs quite possible if you neglect them or run into trouble out in the wilds.
After the birth of your litter, the first bit of the game involves catching prey and carrying it back to your den until the kittens have grown enough to follow you out during the hunt. After they are willing to stretch their legs though, you don’t need to return to the den to rest or anything, and the mother lynx doesn’t require food herself, although she can eat it to restore her stamina. That stamina is incredibly useful, as most of the rest of your game will be spent hunting down prey to feed to your offspring. There is no linear path to be taken in Shelter 2, the story progressing instead based on the growth of your kittens and ending once they are self-sufficient, provided at least one of them survives. Survival, surprisingly, isn’t as difficult as you might expect. The game’s marketing emphasizes the raw impartiality of nature, but nature in Shelter 2 is happy to have abundant rabbits scattered around for you to easily hunt down. They do require a chase, the bunnies smart enough to juke and change their path a bit so they’re not always inevitably caught, but a caught hare can feed two lynxes well, and they are often in groups so you can even grab one, drop it, and then quickly catch another to feed the whole litter.
There are other creatures you can catch if you venture out far enough away from your den. Voles are the easiest to catch and your kittens will quickly start pouncing on them as well, but these small rodents provide a meal only for a single cat. Frogs can be found by water and provide lean meals as well, and while pheasants are harder to find and will fly off if you don’t catch them in time, they feed three lynx babies. Deer are the hardest catches since they’re flighty and sprint away the fastest, but they will satisfy the entire litter. Other meals can be found such as nests full of eggs you can knock out of trees, but the important detail is that, no matter what food source you’re relying on wherever you are in the map, scarcity isn’t often a problem. As long as you make sure the food is distributed evenly enough to the kittens, starvation isn’t a worry, and even if it was, it’s hard to determine which kitten is starving because it seems only a size difference will really give it away.
There is some clever work done to make hunting a touch harder. The whole world of Shelter 2 has a sort of particle board pattern approach to its simple textures, the emphasized polygonal geometry giving it a distinct look that can sabotage your hunting efforts. Sometimes it is in a reasonable way such as the different rabbit types camouflaging better depending on the season, the progress of the story taking you through a year of seasons despite a playthrough only being about two hours. However, the fact bushes and rocks can often look alike makes it so that a clever attempt to herd a rabbit towards what looks like a rock ends up foiled by foliage instead. It’s hard to be upset because there’s bound to be food nearby anyway, and you even have a special ability to sense it. The game doesn’t tutorialize any of its actions particularly well even though it does use narrative text to explain the mother’s journey and the growth of her litter, but pressing the right key will make the world grey out save for anything edible being highlighted in red. Even if it’s far off you can spot your prey pretty easily with this special sense and go grab a meal or two.
Technically, there is not much forcing you to explore the world of Shelter 2. If you saw fit, you can linger in an area and raise your kittens pretty easily on bunnies alone, the game not concocting many interesting punishments for doing so. There are random events like lightning that can start fires and an ethereal dark fog that can cause a cub to freeze up in fear if they’re caught in it, but these are fairly easy to spot and avoid by fleeing. Venturing out to explore the world is the more interesting and natural compulsion though, and when you use your special sense, you can notice markers that indicate different parts of the map such as a more open tundra area or a snowy forest. The snow area has pheasants but overall its food is less common, and the tundra, while being fairly reliable for deer and bird nests, has the one real threat to be worried about. Packs of wolves can start running across the land, eager to snap up your cubs and carry them away for a meal. They’re fast so often the best plan is to reach a high place… but I pounced directly into the alpha wolf, the screen blacked out, and the wolves were gone with all of my kittens still safe. In fact, the mother is immune to danger entirely. If she dives into water that’s too deep, she’ll teleport out just fine. Her mortal peril is entirely absent, but the kittens aren’t really in much danger themselves if you just avoid trouble areas or play decently.
Shelter 2 also decides to introduce an absurd amount of collectibles to find, feathers, flowers, rocks, and other basic items from nature adding up to almost 400 possible items to collect. They blend in with the world well, don’t show up when you use your sense power, are tracked poorly, and only have a mild shimmer to help them stand out. Supposedly some are not even accessible unless you edit the game’s code to boot, making an already pointless and tedious side activity even harder to justify any investment in. The main quest of helping your children grow is thus the main attraction, but despite giving them all names, the process of keeping them alive feels a little too streamlined and risk-free. After you complete the game once though you can start a new file as one of the children all grown up and raising their own litter, but Survival mode is where the game attempts to rectify some of its difficulty issues. Prey is harder to catch and migrates between zones, you run out of stamina more quickly, and your special sense has a cost attached to it. This does make things a bit harder naturally, but it also makes things more tedious, the real dangers instead found in the DLC expansion.
If you get the Mountains DLC, the game adds in one new area that is practically the challenge area, a more uneven landscape befitting its name added to the open world. More importantly, this adds in additional predators, foxes slinking around behind you at times to snatch cubs when you’re not looking, hawks sometimes appearing overhead to try and snatch a child, and bears patrolling about and getting aggressive if you draw too close. These new foes are mostly found in the mountains but can crop up elsewhere, and while it is nice to have greater risk to deliver on those potentially heart-wrenching moments where you might lose a cub, these additions still don’t feel like they have a big enough impact on the affair to claw it out of the food-collecting rut you’re stuck in for much of the journey. Some people have put an impressive amount of play time in this game according to Steam, and I assume it must be from players being captivated by the idea of playing as a lynx in an open world regardless of how the execution is handled, but no matter how you explore or whether or not you have the DLC, Shelter 2 settles into a repetitive cycle that isn’t very appealing despite playing into the simulation aspect.
THE VERDICT: Shelter 2 can be occasionally lovely with its distinct style, but its premise of trying to raise your young in an unforgiving world is undercut by how forgiving the world truly is. Food isn’t as scarce as you’d expect even in the tougher difficulty mode, and catching it isn’t an exhilarating process either. Without the DLC the only threats to your litter’s life are easily avoided, especially if you just settle into one safe area for your entire two hour journey. Heading out into the world is interesting enough to draw you away from the safest play style, but despite trying to be a game about nature’s harsh realities, it mostly seems to depict the mother lynx as a creature who gets by with only the rare hiccup to break up her monotonous life.
And so, I give Shelter 2 for PC…
A BAD rating. An unexpected step down in quality from the original Shelter even though it seemingly took the natural course for growing the concept of playing as a mammalian mother raising her litter, Shelter 2 opened its world up and ended up comparatively bare. The badger’s journey may not do much to invest you in the children and has technical issues, but the levels are planned out to have highlights and exciting yet dangerous moments. Shelter 2 allows the player to settle into the simple life if they so choose, and even venturing out doesn’t pose as much of a threat as it conceptually should. The DLC and Survival mode aim to rectify this some, but the hunt that is at the core of your entire adventure struggles to entertain, and the rare random event to spice it up is often not constructed in a way where it can consistently provide an injection of intensity. The danger feels absent and the food too abundant for about 90% of your journey, and while that makes the potential loss of a cat more dramatic since it is such an unexpected disruption, puncturing the monotony is hardly enough to make up for the moments surrounding this sudden surge of excitement.
People have managed to squeeze some entertainment from Shelter 2 by being able to fully immerse themselves in the simulation aspect, but the idea of playing as a mother lynx could certainly be done better. The developers chose the lynx to be the playable animal because of its spot in the middle of the food chain, so this should have been emphasized better without having to purchase DLC, and even if you do buy it the DLC’s dangers do not feel as present as they possibly should. The lack of any human influence is a stylistic choice worthy of sticking to, but this ecosystem feels like the lynx is practically the apex predator save for the rare appearance of something that can snatch a baby if she’s off her game. In its current form, Shelter 2 is mostly a game about chasing rabbits, the open world design perhaps needing a greater incursion from scripted dangers or a wider selection of random interruptions to really begin to tap into the idea you are a mother lynx fighting for her life. Even if the nature sim aspect appeals to a player now, a more robust world with more variety to break up the monotony more often could be done while remaining faithful to reality, so giving Mother Nature a bit more teeth definitely feels like the path to helping Shelter 2 actually deliver on its gameplay concepts in an entertaining yet meaningful manner.