Update March 06, 2025: We would also like to share that Might & Delight has an 80% off sale going on for all Shelter games + DLC to celebrate Shelter 2’s anniversary on Steam!
Shelter was sent to us for review by Might & Delight. In this short, indie survival game, you play as a badger trying to keep your offspring alive. The game is very simple in its premise: navigate through nature and ensure the survival of your babies. Of course this sounds a lot easier than it actually is both in terms of hazards and gameplay. You must traverse through sprawling landscapes while foraging for roots, hunting small game and the occasional fox (if you’re stealthy and lucky enough to manage killing one) all to feed your cubs.
Feeding your babies seems easy enough at first, starting with 4 healthy but tiny badger babies who follow you and one sickly, discolored and immobile baby. Your first task is to scrounge up some food for the sickly baby who bounces back and is just as spry as the rest of your bouncing baby badgers. You soon find yourself wandering the land feeding them, curiously watching the color of their fur fade when they are hungry. The cubs follow your every move in the peaceful landscape and you’ll eventually track down apples, frogs, and rodents. These seem plentiful and scavenging across the pastel landscape is relaxing. Eventually you’ll encounter the reality of nature and the food will slowly dwindle, birds of prey will attack, flooding waters will wash life away, predators attack in the dark and you may lose your babies one by one or if you’re not vigilant, all at once.
While there is no direct storytelling in this game, there is definitely an unspoken plot in this adventure. It is short but riveting. You’ll find yourself strangely attached to the little critters you’re trying to keep alive and you’ll feel a sense of loss every single time one of them disappears from your screen. The babies do not have names but they can be differentiated by their slight variances in color. It can be tricky at times to figure out which ones you have fed most recently especially when you inadvertently drop a piece of food and they rush for it, worrying not about their brothers and sisters. The predators in the game feel truly terrifying as you see shadows and hear the cries of the babies being carried off, never to be seen again. The game never feels unfair in terms of gameplay but it feels unfair with the loss of cute critters within the story.
In terms of gameplay, the game controls are extremely easy. You have basic 3 dimensional movement (with stealth, walking and sprinting), control of the camera, and a single button that controls all other actions. Barking, picking things up, dropping things, and pouncing all use the same button (or trigger in my case as I played using the Steamdeck and a community based control system). The actions are all context based which means that when there is nothing around you, your default action is to bark and when an item/critter is next to you you’ll pick it up or pounce on it. This means that you are unable to pounce without a creature being around.
The graphics are reminiscent of paper mosaics. The game looks like a mashup of glue, cardboard and tissue paper (think of South Park or the Hungry, Hungry Caterpillar) but with a bit more movement. At times the textures look great and you’ll find yourself immersed in the quant little world when it’s peaceful. At other times the textures seem to clash and it can look overwhelmingly complicated and busy. Shelter makes excellent use of its limited color palettes and textures, especially in the night themed darker level where your vision is limited to a narrower area. Though, strangely the game’s night sky is swarming with stars and planets making it look like the sky is a repeating, space themed wallpaper. I choose to believe that this eerie looking sky is how the badgers see the stars; otherworldly glowing circles and shapes against the darkness.
Shelter is a straightforward indie game at its core and it’s refreshing with its innovative ideas in storytelling and gameplay. The game does not do anything outside of its intended purpose of showing you the harsh reality of nature. You cannot play as anything besides the mother badger and there aren’t diverging paths or side missions. What Shelter does is take you into the role of an animal trying to do its best to keep its babies alive and keep you emotionally invested in the livelihood of these tiny creatures. You’ll see them grow so slowly that you won’t notice they’ve gotten bigger until they’re much older, and you’ll see them be snatched so quickly that you won’t even know how it happened. The game manages to make you feel lonely when all of your babies die, and that speaks volumes for a game without dialogue. You feel a sense of guilt and shame when a baby lags behind, and you suddenly hear it cry as it’s taken from this digital world. Shelter is a satisfying game to play and while on the surface the game seems simple, it’s the unspoken reality of nature that propels you forward and compels you to protect these tiny creatures from harm.
Sushiball Games 