‘The Cabin Factory’ Tests Your Eye for Fine, Frightening Details

The Cabin Factory asks you to check and see if an array of creepy mass-produced movie cabins are haunted or not.

It’s your first day on the job (and given your task, I get the feeling most people don’t make it past the first day), and you need to walk around a couple of cabins and determine if there’s any supernatural phenomena happening in them. Can’t have any pesky hauntings when famous actors hop into these log cabins and act in their next hit horror movie. So, you’ll have to march through a handful of rooms (filled with some uncomfortably real-looking mannequins) and see if any spooky things are moving about. If you don’t see anything, you can leave and mark the place safe. If you see something, you get yourself out quick and mark it as dangerous and move onto the next one.

This is, naturally, not terribly easy to do. For starters, while you might feel safe on the well-lit factory floor, there’s an overwhelming sense of dread the moment you step inside the cabin. The oppressive darkness and the creepy, detailed pictures and mannequins leave you constantly worrying about when something is going to jump out at you. Since your whole job involves looking through these places for scary things or weird movements, you’re forced to pore over every detail of the house as you go. You need to stare the potential hauntings down rather than flee (although you DO have to escape once you’re sure something is wrong).

That lingering and obsessing – peering deep into something that is likely going to frighten or kill you – really made me uneasy as I played The Cabin Factory. That constant uncertainty about whether something is new or if you’d just never noticed it (and finding out you were correct about something being off) makes every step feel loaded with dread as you try to find the haunting before it traps or kills you. The game asks you to really soak in your fear as you play it, as you need to be right about the haunting quite a few times in a row to finish your work day. So, expect to find yourself staring into your oncoming death as you force yourself to be sure the place is haunted. It’s a drag to be killed by a haunting, but even worse to keep screwing up at work, right?

The Cabin Factory will be made available today on Steam.

About The Author

Joel Couture

Joel has been covering indie games for various sites including IndieGames.com, Siliconera, Gamasutra, Warp Door, CG Magazine, and more over the past seven years, and has written book-length studies on Undertale and P.T.. Joel is constantly on the lookout for digital experiences that push the boundaries of what games can be, and seeks to delve into the creative process, meanings, and emotion labor that goes into the work of artists worldwide.