Never mind the crafting, Squirreled Away is at its best when you’re simply a scampering rodent

rockpapershotgun.com:

I’ve been trying the demo for Squirreled Away, and for some reason it keeps wanting me to play it as some kinda 2024-as-heck survival crafting game. At this, I make several rapid sniffing-like movements, then scarper adeptly yet dismissively up the nearest tree. It’s just far more fun to treat this as a casual squirrel sim, or, at the very least, a platformer where you occasionally need to steal some strawberries.

Look, I’ve played enough Minecraft to appreciate the pleasures of hewing a home together from Mother Gaia’s offcuts. But Squirreled Away’s scavenging and building don’t really do anything to explore beyond familiar stick-to-plank-to-hut tropes, even with the briefly amusing sight of your fluffy protagonist lugging a tiny rock axe on his back. It’s not like you’re crafting to survive anything, either: there are no elements to endure and the only consequence of letting your stamina run out is an inability to swing your tools. No enemies to be scared of either, unless you’re that American cop who magdumped an acorn.

Instead, I recommend using what the demo gives you for gathering purposes – a roamable forest, freeform climbing abilities, zero fall damage – to engage in a spot of chilled-out tree rat parkour. Now this is a good time. There’s a perfectly judged stickiness to how you latch on to bark and branches, and many of the latter look like they were placed specifically for daring cross-canopy leaps. Screenshots for the full game present the tantalising possibility of eventually gaining a dinky hang glider, which might be the one thing in all of existence that could get me back to crafting. You will believe a squirrel can fly.

Down on the ground, the capacity for hijinks is diminished, though I did a smile at my expectedly terrible attempts to strum a guitar, and at how readily I could destroy camping equipment in pursuit of rare golden nuts. Squirreled Away definitely leans further towards cosiness than chaos – it’s not exactly Squirrel With a Gun, with