Squirreled Away

I'll be straight with you: I cover shooters, not squirrel simulators. But movement is movement, and Squirreled Away's traversal is the kind of thing that makes you stop mid-session and think about what you're actually doing. Running up a tree trunk, hitting a branch at speed, launching yourself across a gap to the next canopy - it clicks fast and feels clean. That alone separated it from the pile of cozy crafting games I've had to sit through. The third-person controls translate well to both controller and keyboard, and there's no artificial friction added to make things feel weighty. You just go. The loop is gather, meditate, craft, build. You pick up materials - sticks, rocks, resin, paperclips, coins, feathers - and take them to stone shrine spots where your squirrel meditates and unlocks new recipes. It sounds fiddly on paper, but the pacing keeps it from feeling like busywork. Quest-givers are the park's animal population: a Hedgehog King with prickly demands, a bird selling tree real estate, other squirrels with their own errands. One sends you to blast yourself out of a cannon. Another wants you to deal with the neighbourhood bulldog, who will chase you down if you wander near the house. The bulldog is the closest thing to a threat in the game - there's no fall damage, no hunger meter, no stamina death spiral. It's a deliberate design choice and it works for the audience this targets. The adventure mode keeps quests structured; a separate creative mode just lets you build whatever you want in the treetops without the quest scaffolding around it. The treehouse building is the other pillar and it holds up. Snap-placement handles structure, free-placement handles decoration, and neither mode gets in the way of the other. You can go simple or go elaborate - reviewers noted that the system is detailed enough to produce genuinely impressive builds without ever becoming the kind of menu-hell that makes crafters feel like spreadsheets. Four-player online co-op works for the most part, though co-op has logged some quest sync issues where one player gets credit and the other doesn't, which can lock progress. Inventory management is the other friction point: slots are gated behind finding golden acorns scattered across the map, and until you find enough of them you'll constantly be dropping things you want to keep. Here's the part that matters for a buying decision right now. Developer Far Seas closed in September 2025. The game shipped in a reasonably polished state and already sits at a strong positive rating on Steam, but there will be no further patches. The co-op quest sync bug is not going to get fixed. A lack of fast travel in a game this spread out is staying a lack of fast travel. The audio, which features one looping track per zone that occasionally just cuts out, is not going to be addressed. If you can live with those rough edges as permanent features rather than temporary ones, the core of the game is solid: movement that's fun to just run around in, a crafting system that doesn't punish you for not reading guides, and an adventure mode with enough quest variety to fill a decent handful of sessions. Bring three friends and the co-op adds real charm, just understand you're buying a finished product with no support runway behind it.

Fred · Scout Team

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