The Cabin Factory is not a game that was meant to be played, it was meant to be streamed. You’re not meant to enjoy it, you’re meant to react to it, and that’s what I did. But how do I review a game I simply reacted to?
I’ll start by reacting to the game’s premise. As a new employee of the Cabin Factory, you’ve been hired to inspect cabins to make sure they’re not haunted. Apparently, there have been issues with some previous models. This is explained as you’re in an elevator riding up to the 8th floor of the factory.
How this company gets a prefabricated cabin down from the 8th floor of a building to the ground floor docking bay for transportation is not of your concern. Maybe you started eight floors underground in HR or something?
Anyway, the cabins. They roll out on an assembly line, and your job is to wander through to see if they’re haunted. The problem is that these cabins are made specifically for the “horror industry” (movies, theme parks, that no-outlet road down the street from me that runs alongside the railroad tracks, most likely). So, they already look haunted. There should be no movement, however, according to a note on the “danger” console. If you detect movement, you’re supposed to run back and hit the danger button. If not, you hit clear.
Next, I’ll react to the gameplay. The moment you step into a cabin, the bright, fluorescent lights of the factory floor are replaced by the dim glow of lanterns and what I assume is simulated moonlight through windows. Gotta test the product in the environment in which they’re used, I suppose, complete with howling wind. It’s kind of funny, really. I imagine The Organization is a loyal customer.
As with any job, really, your first day at the office is the creepiest (and I say this as a guy who once started a new job in a NYC office building to find naked dolls on everyone’s monitor). You’ll find an impossibly lit painting that seemingly stares at you, a seemingly angry fellow hunched over a dinner table, a kid sitting on the floor with a towel over his head. Are these supposed to be here? Are they props for the cabin’s ultimate use? They’re not moving, so keep exploring.
When you’re satisfied you’ve searched everything, you go outside and hit clear. Next cabin.
Cabin two has the same internal props and lighting/audio effects, making the gameplay apparent. You’re searching for differences now. Is anything behaving in a way that it didn’t previously? A quick investigation reveals that yes, it is, so you run outside and hit danger. Next cabin.
That, then, is your gameplay, although it does, of course, become more involved. You’re not simply detecting movement and then running outside…actually, you kind of are. A story surfaces for you to follow. You discover that the prop cabins are based on a real cabin in which things didn’t go well, and the props are pulled from those events. This takes place over the course of eight cabins. If you properly identify whether it’s haunted, you move on. If you’re wrong, it resets…which means someone at the factory already knows if they’re haunted! What are they even paying you for?!
Now, it’s time to react to a few problems. You can imagine all of this would grow tiresome after a while. It does, especially when you hit the wrong button and reset. Thankfully, The Cabin Factory does throw some narrative and gameplay curveballs at you. Trust me when I say it often goes in directions you wouldn’t expect. It also ends within an hour and a half. This is a short game that doesn’t wear out its welcome.
However, it’s also never particularly scary. Walking into the same location over and over again knowing that something could change at any minute—either subtly or as a full-on jump scare—is quite unsettling, but by the end you’ll be begging for something to change. And after taking the same steps over and over, I started getting lazy and wouldn’t fully enter a room; wouldn’t fully go up the stairs. This likely led to situations where the haunting wasn’t triggered, making me think things were OK. To me, the scariest part was the fear of being wrong when indicating “clear.”
It doesn’t help that the game is so dark. The graphics are fine, but some of the hauntings are so hard to detect that you may need to jack up the brightness to see them. You also won’t want to play this in handheld mode, which makes detection even harder. It’s best to play it docked with the lights off in the room. Even better if you have a couple others on hand to help you suss out the situation.
And that’s my final reaction. The Cabin Factory is not a gaming session, it’s a movie night. It doesn’t replace Fatal Frame or Cronos, it replaces Longlegs or The Evil Dead. Like most horror movies worth seeing, it blends creepiness with a few jump scares and a few laughs to keep you on edge for an hour or two. It also only costs $3.00, cheaper than renting a movie you’ve already seen.
So, don’t worry that Halloween is behind us. Spend a little, react for a while, then take comfort in knowing that—comparatively speaking—maybe your job isn’t so bad after all.
