Refreshingly, my on-screen avatar is not a soldier or a space-marine or a person with a gun this time. It is a badger. Not an anthropomorphic cartoon badger, just a simple four-legged snuffling creature with five cubs nestled around her (him? For me, it’s a her). The cubs yip and mewl, frolicking around a turnip in the ground that I dig up and feed to the weakest of them, a greyed-out little form sprawled pitiably on the floor of this underground burrow. The cub eats, and stands, and joins the others as they follow me out of the sett and into the world, where I keep nervously looking behind me to check that they’re still there as I hunt around for things to feed them. I am responsible, and they are hungry and helpless. I did not know that being a badger was so incredibly stressful.
The things I do not know about being a badger, it turns out, are manifold. Shelter plays with parental instinct, crafting something deeply emotionally relatable from abstract graphics and carefully-directed ambient sound (and badgers). It starts out calm and unhurried, like a free-roaming nature documentary, but before long, peril encroaches upon your snuffling and wandering. Hawks circle ominously, their shadows passing overhead as you hide with your cubs in tall grass. Night falls, bringing danger with it. You can hunt frogs, rodents and foxes if you’re quick and careful, but doing so leaves your cubs struggling to keep up.
Shelter isn’t a long game, but it’s beautifully paced. Like Journey, its emotional narrative and the end result will be broadly the same for anyone who plays it; the difference is how you get there.
The things I do not know about being a badger, it turns out, are manifold.
I lost my first cub in the dark. At night, your field of vision is restricted to a radius of light. The moon overhead is little help, and trees fronds of vegetation take on a menacing aspect in the gloom. Following the course of a river, which stands out like a bright ribbon against the darkness, I’m looking around for food when a snapping twig spooked the little guys. They scampered off ahead, outside my miniscule field of vision. I ran after them, terrified, as a dissonant chorus of wolflike snarls built in the background, trying to follow their panicked yelps. Then there was an agonising squeal, a crunch, and only four of them returned to my side.
I felt terrible. But Shelter’s effectiveness is heightened by the fact that your own emotions aren’t mirrored on-screen. There, it’s just nature; it’s just what happens. There’s no time to mourn. The other four cubs still need to be fed.
Later, we escaped the night, but the respite was brief. As the cubs get hungrier, they get slower, and start to grey out. Out of desperation to catch a fox to feed them, I accidentally scare it off instead, and one of the remaining cubs starts to hang back. Whenever I find food, I have to choose which of my hungry cubs gets to eat, which is a horrible decision to make. They need their strength. Crossing rivers, weaker cubs will be swept away. Or plucked from the ground by a hawk. Or they’ll just stop moving.
Shelter is devoid of actual humans, but brimming with humanity.
Later still, the forest is burning. Shelter’s abstract graphical style depicts the flames as needles of red and orange, licking at the edges of the grass, and now on top of everything else the badgers will be burned to death if they don’t hurry. I’m suddenly reminded of a cartoon series that aired when I was little called The Animals of Farthing Wood, in which a group of woodland creatures had to flee their habitat because of construction and natural disaster. I seem to remember that almost all of them ended up dead.
I don’t want to spoil Shetler’s ending. The game has already been Greenlit on Steam, and the version I played was clearly close to finished, so you’ll be able to experience it for yourself before too long. I will say that it’ll stay with me for a good long while. Shelter is a tribute to nature, a survival game of sorts, a simulation of parental responsibility; it’s devoid of actual humans, but brimming with humanity. The comparison to Journey isn’t overblown.
Keza MacDonald is in charge of IGN's games coverage in the UK. You can follow her on IGN and Twitter.
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