The Cabin Factory – So THAT’S how cabins are made!

Being an anomaly spotting game with a twist means The Cabin Factory feels fresh but also appears simplistic.

These horror observation games or, as I like to call them, 3D spot the difference games, are popping up everywhere right now. The likes of I’m on Observation Duty and Project 13 all have you looking at the same place over and over again, trying to spot if something’s different. Sometimes you’ll get something obvious, but wonderfully creepy or unique, but most of the time you’ll be scouring the area to see if there’s one extra plate in the kitchen. The Cabin Factory has a similar concept, but is more interested in providing scares than spotting differences, so in that regard it’s a fun experience, but those scares make it very easy to spot when something’s odd leading to a very brief, heightened experience.

You play as Greta, a lady working at, of all things, a factory that manufactures cabins for horror movies. It’s a bizarre setup, with you working completely alone in a gargantuan warehouse, with cabins launching along a conveyor belt for you to examine. Your job is to determine if the cabins are safe or not, and if you manage to correctly determine this eight times in a row, you win and get to go home!

In my arrogance, I went into the first and second cabins and tried to find something different. And found something I did! So I wandered back out and pressed the Danger button only to be told I was wrong. I did this a few more times, not understanding what I was doing wrong before I actually bothered to read the instruction. In The Cabin Factory, you’re actually looking to see if the cabins are haunted, and you can determine this by anything in the house moving. Spot movement, and you press Danger, find nothing of the sort and you press Safe.

I quite liked this, as it led to some actually scary moments. Walking past the picture of a creepy woman and going up the stairs, only to return to find that same lady standing in front of the picture before she chased me caught me very much off guard. This game uses a bunch of admittedly cliched, but very entertaining horror tropes to mess with you. After that early scare I was very cautious going into the next cabin. Knowing that everything could be fine only for me to be lunged at all of a sudden kept me on edge.

Some of the movements are very subtle, so you do actually need to pay attention. It could be something as simple as a doll moving its legs, or a cup sliding along a table, but frequently it’s much more overt. This leads to the issue I have with The Cabin Factory: it’s mostly very easy. Spotting movement is incredibly quick a lot of the time, so frequently you can be in and out of a cabin in a matter of fifteen seconds, meaning this game is over rather quickly depending on what you get. I managed to finish within an hour, and that even includes my initial idiocy and being caught by ghosts on a couple of occasions, which resets your progress.

It seems like the devs were aware of this, and thankfully there are a few really fun ones that mess with your expectations. I won’t spoil what happens in them, but on occasion I found that I couldn’t hit the button I needed to. I just wish there was more of this, as even after finishing and going back in to see all the different cabins, I’d been through all of them within just another hour.

Visually, this is a rather pretty game, but it does chug a bit when first loading it up. Inexplicably, you’re straight into the game with no title card or menu so the engine is loading up all the assets immediately. For the most part though, it ran smoothly. There are some nice lighting effects here and there, and the character models are quite well detailed, as is the cabin interior. Sounds are solid, and don’t use the overly loud stings that so many games rely on for jump scares. There are some well done voice lines here and there, but they’re few and far between.

I like to think that there’s more to The Cabin Factory though, as there are hints of a further story about Greta seemingly having a connection to this cabin and the ghosts within, but if there is any way to delve into that further, I haven’t found it. This is a fun and somewhat unique twist on the genre-of-the-moment, so I’d have liked more to enjoy. Getting through what I believe to be everything to see in under two hours feels a little underwhelming to me, but hopefully the developers will release more games like this in the future. As it stands, I’d say it’s not an unreasonable visit, but you won’t stay in this cabin for long.

The Cabin Factory is available now on PC.