Squirreled Away Review

Squirreled Away is a pleasant little gather 'n' craft sandbox game where you're a tiny squirrel, gathering resources and building miniature treehouses. The concept of constructing your own home within the trees feels refreshing in a genre that's grown so formulaic, and this game's unique approach makes for an enjoyable walk through the park. Literally! However, the game's concept is at odds with itself, and it shows.

Your creativity is stifled by the limited selection of build parts, likely partly due to budget limitations, but also because they can only let you construct so much when you're a squirrel. Additionally, since the gameplay revolves so heavily around human-like sandbox elements, it feels more like you're a human in a squirrel's body than a real animal.

These conflicting interests drag the entire experience down. Don't get me wrong— like I said, Squirrelled Away is still enjoyable, and it's charming too! But this game never crosses the line from "good" to "great" because every dimension of the game is held back by this conflict of interests.

If you want a game where you feel like a squirrel, Squirreled Away gets part of the way there but doesn't quite reach the finish line. The only real "squirrel" elements are your size and the ability to climb trees, and these gameplay mechanics have been seen in other games anyway. More importantly, the gameplay loop itself is built around activities that only a human would do: using tools, harvesting resources, then using them to construct homes with furniture that looks like it was built for a human. I mean c'mon, the bed looks like a typical bed that you'd see in a game like Minecraft or Valheim. It doesn't even try to look like something a squirrel would use.

Furniture that you build doesn't look much like something that a squirrel would use.

Since the game aims to be a laid-back experience, there aren't any survival elements emphasizing what a squirrel would do to survive in the wild. You don't have to eat, and you don't have to avoid predators— with the exception of one easily-avoidable dog, which is the only "enemy" in the entire game. They do attempt to make a reference to real-world squirrel behavior by encouraging you to hoard acorns, but you're not doing it to save up food for the winter. They're just collectibles, rewarded for exploring the park.

And don't get me wrong, I understand why they chose this direction. If Squirreled Away were a survival game, it'd lose much of its appeal to casual gamers. And if you were to strip away the sandbox mechanics because a real-world squirrel wouldn't swing an axe or build gadgets, you'd have very little to actually do in the game.

But that brings me back around to how the sandbox elements of Squirreled Away are stifled by the limited selection of build parts. You're presented with only a limited selection of wooden parts, a few pieces of furniture, and some decorations. And there are only two building materials to work with: wood and planks. Yes, really. I understand the limitations, as you're a squirrel building treehouses, after all; but this is a perfect illustration of how the concept of playing as a squirrel conflicts with the idea of constructing a home.

Squirreled Away only has two building materials: wood, and planks. It's not much to work with.

What could they have done about this? Honestly, I'm not quite sure. Maybe it's just a fundamental limitation of the concept behind Squirreled Away that's worth accepting, maybe they should've made it a survival game, or maybe they should've ditched the idea of playing as a squirrel altogether and made your character anthropomorphic. I don't know, really. I'll leave it to you to decide. But although I can't provide a solution, I can tell you that this problem is what prevents me from calling this game great.

I'll admit, though, Squirreled Away has a couple more issues beyond the conflicting concept. The park, although beautiful, feels a bit lifeless. The squirrel residents provide very little interaction, offering only a single, simple sidequest per character— and they are usually fetch quests or chores. Those sidequests don't lead to character development either, making each squirrel you encounter feel underdeveloped as a character.

And the park, while visually appealing, is static. There's no day/night cycle, weather, or seasons. In a game so closely tied to nature, you'd expect at least one of those mechanics to make the world feel a bit dynamic. The lack of a day/night cycle especially stands out, as time never passes and the sun never moves. Squirreled Away has a beautiful art style, and I can only imagine what they could've done with it had the world been more dynamic.

The mechanics that could've made the world feel more dynamic could've also been integrated into the fishing system, which feels a bit underbaked. The game offers the bare minimum fishing mechanic that you'd expect from a gather 'n' craft sandbox game: Cast your line, then press a button when a fish bites to reel it in. There’s nothing more to it, and because the world is static, there’s little incentive to revisit a body of water after your first haul. Adding time‑of‑day and weather‑dependent fish spawns, or even just a little fishing minigame, could've given it a lot more depth. Because right now, it's not worth engaging with. I only bothered with it so that I could earn all of the achievements.

Fishing is cute, but much like the rest of the game, it would've benefited from being more dynamic.

Unfortunately, even if the developers had the time and budget to make the world feel more dynamic, the performance might struggle. Squirreled Away runs on Unreal Engine 5, and some of the visual effects are pretty technically demanding. With the right settings, the game can hold around 30fps on the Steam Deck, but only barely— there are a few dips here and there, isolated to a couple small areas. On my desktop, the performance is a bit better, but it's still far from ideal. I happened to play The Elder Scrolls V: Oblivion Remastered with FSR frame generation enabled around the time that I played Squirreled Away, and I couldn't help but notice similar average framerates. However, it's important to note that Squirreled Away doesn't offer frame generation, so it's not exactly a fair comparison; but given that Squirreled Away has a much more simplistic art style, I would at least expect similar performance.

All that said, it's worth remembering that the team behind Squirreled Away is a small indie studio. They don't have an entire team dedicated to optimization. This game also delivers some beautiful visuals, and there aren't any precision-based mechanics that necessitate a high framerate, so there's plenty of reason to cut them some slack.

However, although visuals in Squirreled Away are pretty pretty, the sound and music leaves much to be desired. The music, in particular, is rather underwhelming. There are only a handful of songs in the game, and they're all kind of mediocre. They're short enough that the loops eventually begin feeling repetitive, and they're simplistic enough that there really isn't much detail to encourage replayability. That musical simplicity might've been intentional, fitting the game's relaxed tone and how you're living the simple life as a squirrel, but in this case, the execution just doesn't make for some memorable music.

There's a glitch where, if you approach a tree from the right angle, you can use the magnetic pull built into the clinging mechanic to slingshot yourself across the park with the glider. It's hard to pull off, but fun!

But please, don't get me wrong. I may have focused a lot on the issues with Squirreled Away in this review, but I'd still recommend it. The graphics are, as I mentioned, beautiful. The environments look great, and movement is fun— something that's pretty important in a sandbox game where there isn't much else to do besides build.

Eventually, you'll be introduced to both a glider and pogo stick, and the climbing mechanics feel great and genuinely squirrel-like. You can bounce onto a tree with a pogo stick and then glide off of it into the distance with the glider. It feels pretty good.

And I've gotta admit, there's some novelty in getting to play as a squirrel. Climbing around and exploring a world that's so much bigger than yourself feels great, and all of the aforementioned issues with how the sandbox elements of Squirreled Away make you feel less like a squirrel and more like a human begin to fade away when you can take a literal walk through the park and appreciate the sights... and how huge that sign next to you looks.

Squirreled Away has a great sense of scale, and it's one of the few things that make it feel a bit like you're a squirrel.

The team behind Squirreled Away, Far Seas, has also been quite responsive to feedback. Its been a couple months since the last update, so I'm not sure if they'll continue, but I'm glad to have seen that a suggestion that I provided for the default settings on the Steam Deck was implemented exactly as I described.

Despite the clear flaws, I'd still recommend Squirreled Away if you're looking for a pleasant little sandbox game where you get to play as a squirrel. There's some novelty here, and it's a relaxing experience to unwind with. I just hope that if there's ever a Squirreled Away 2, these issues will be addressed. There's plenty of room for improvement.