I guess I should start with the most damning phrase I can. I hate my parents. I know, how 14 year old teenage girl of me, right? Seriously though, they are bad people. They hurt me throughout my life and to this day, coming up on my thirtieth birthday, I am STILL recovering from trauma they made me endure. It's amazing how well adjusted I did turn out, considering. So, because of this, it's made me highly empathetic, whether it comes to friends or pets. I have always made myself available to those around me, always letting them know I care about them, or am here if they need someone to talk to or need help of some kind. This carries over into gaming as well. For example, as a teenage loser playing Sonic Adventure 2 in my bedroom for hours at a time, I adored the Chao in my Chao garden, considering them my digital children. God help me if someone had ever given me a fucking Tamagotchi.

For all those reasons, it was probably a bad idea, in hindsight, to let someone like me play a game like Shelter. Shelter, made by Might & Delight, is a game I've had on my radar for a long time now. Its eye catching visuals were the first thing that reeled me in, but the premise even more so. You play as a mother badger trying to protect and keep her children safe as you search for a new place to live in peace. You have to feed your kids along the way and protect them from an enormous giant bird that's trying to steal and eat your babies. The game is not very long. I beat it in under 2 hours. I lost 3 of my children before the first hour was up, two to starvation, another to being snatched by said giant bird, and after the first hour, I managed to keep my other two cubs around for a while. One was eventually washed away from me by a river and I swear I could hear his bones crack as it threw him against a rock violently. Gotta admit, that one really, genuinely hurt. But I swore to myself that I would not let this game take all my kids from me, and no matter what, I would make it to the end with at least one of my children and give them a better life.

By the end of the game, we'd arrived at a giant field with death eagle soaring about overhead, just waiting for me to screw up. I did manage to get my last badger cub to the safety of the world, and I felt great about that. I had felt so protective over these digital badger babies that when anything happened to one of them, I had to stop for a minute and debate whether or not I could emotionally handle actually attempting to beat this title. I did soldier on, only to then lose another cub after another cub, much to the pain in my heart. See, there's something about parenting that my parents didn't fundamentally grasp, and that is sacrifice. Oh, it's easy to hold your arms out and say, "Look at all we've given you! Roof over your head, clothes on your back, food on the table!" and assume that this is the end all, be all definition of sacrifice. To be a childs needs before your own. No. Those things are just basic child rearing fodder, and if you want a pat on the back for doing the bare fucking minimum, then maybe you shouldn't have had children.

I'm talking about sacrifice. About doing whatever you can to help make sure your children come out the other end of adolescence happy, healthy and accepted. To take interests in what they do, to keep them safe no matter what, to talk to them and find out who they are as growing people. Actual sacrifice. I'm not talking about "spoiling" your kid, or anything such as that, just treating them like another human being, with respect and love. Your children are supposed to be an extension of yourself, so if you hate yourself, I guess it only makes sense you would hate your children. That being said, I hate myself and I know I would do anything for any future kids I might have, so who knows. Either way, my parents didn't understand this. They made fusses over needing new equipment for school, they constantly threw me at therapists instead of talking to me themselves, they did everything wrong that they could think of and then, on top of all of that, didn't take responsibility for all the wrongness they'd done. At least if they'd copped to it I might've seen a glimmer of redemption. There was no redemption. And certainly no glimmer.

In the last few seconds of the game, mere inches away from safety, I was grabbed by the giant bird and taken away, leaving my last badger cub to go on without me, and it made me think...wow, that's the ultimate sacrifice. You allow the bird to take yourself instead of taking your cub. That's impactful, man. You DIED for your kid. Now, granted, things in the wilderness are obviously different from things in Suburbia, USA. I recognize that we, cool as it would be if we were, are not badgers. But, the idea of that sacrifice, of giving yourself up for the sake of your childs future...I think that's pretty universal to the concept of parenting itself, right? Or at least, it SHOULD be. Either way, Shelter forces you to care about your pixel children, and just in under 2 hours too, which is more than a lot of 8+ hour games have ever managed to accomplish. Might & Delight obviously know how to tug at your heartstrings, and in the most artful way possible, given the visuals of the game.

The music was fantastic as well, swelling at the worst, and the best, times. I don't consider the short run time a bad thing, as I prefer that. There's too much out there that I wanna get through that I don't like it when a game goes too long. I wanna get through it and move on. But those brief 2 hours I spent with these badger kids were intense, and intimate, and I wouldn't ask for it any other way. I have to admit, I wouldn't buy it at full price, only because of the short run time, but if you can nab it on sale, certainly. And I recognize how awful it is for an artist to say you shouldn't pay another bunch of artists full fare for their hard work, but we're all in a financial bind here, alright? I'm just trying to save you, the consumer, money. You're welcome, you handsome devil you.

Shelter works because it's brief. It's runtime actually helps strengthen the bond you feel between your badger kids because you know it won't last long, so you feel obligated to do absolutely everything in your power to give them the best possible future that you can, even if it means, in the end, letting your own future go.

A lot of parents say they'd die for their kids.

But badger parents actually follow through.