The Cabin Factory review - a gimmick worth the cheap price of entry

I like a good gimmick. I think the term unfortunately has negative connotations, used by people to downplay something neat as the only thing going for a product - a game, film, bit of tech, etc. The Cabin Factory is essentially one gimmick. It's not really a full game built around a gimmick, it's just the gimmick. It's a really cool one, though. Is a cabin haunted? Yes or no. Simple. I couldn't play with headphones on, needed to make the room bright, and had Bluey playing on my phone next to my monitor to lower my stress level. It's a damn scary gimmick!

You take on the role of a cabin inspector at The Cabin Factory Incorporation. The factory, as you might have worked out, makes cabins but it also fills them with scary props. The problem is, each cabin is based on a 'real' one in which tragedy struck a family, and the props are related. It's all a bit strange, but perhaps makes the fact that some of the cabins come out haunted a little easier to believe.

As an inspector, you must go into each cabin that comes out of the factory (they all look the same from the outside) and work out if it's haunted. Once you've made a decision you head out and hit the Danger or Clear button, then another Cabin is brought to you via a huge conveyor belt. To finish your shift (and the bulk of the game), you must successfully rate eight cabins in a row - failure to accurately rate them sees the counter reset, but this also made me wonder why I was rating them when the system (or the odd onlookers in an observation room) already knew.

So how are they haunted? Well, in a variety of ways, mostly using the four members of the family who lived there. You might enter one (the lights dim as you do, and you don't have a torch) and notice the dad sitting at the table, posed as if eating some food. A painting of mum hangs on the wall, the daughter is missing, and the son is upstairs in front of a TV, but there's a cloth over his head and a plush frog is casually being cute on a chair. All rather unsettling, for sure, but not haunted. You head for the door fairly happy, but on the way you notice the dad's head turning towards you. F**k this for a laugh! It's time to leg it out the cabin and smash that Danger button. The cabin is whisked away, and a light turns on above the number one. Only seven more to accurately rate in row.

The Cabin Factory is short. I can't have played for much longer than an hour and a half, and that included an extra segment at the end. It's priced accordingly at £2.50, though, so I'm fine with it being a one and done type of experience. There's probably more to eek out if you want to play with friends or fancy yourself as a streamer, but I had my fill. You get a smattering of [redacted to avoid spoilers] that liven things up a little beyond the core cabin inspection after cabin inspection, and these flesh out the slight narrative, too. But this isn't some Portal 2-esque game where you break out of the system, so to speak, the workings revealed for all to see.

I had a fun 90 minutes. Well, fun might be the wrong word. Intense, maybe. I'm not going to venture into any cabins for quite some time, let me tell you - even the fancy ones you find at large Garden Centres scare me a little now, if I'm being honest. Like I said, I like gimmicks. The Cabin Factory is that horror movie you rented because you wanted to turn off your brain and have a good time with your friends, and Don't Look Now wasn't going to deliver the right vibes even though the guy at the counter insisted it was better. It does the job.

A copy of The Cabin Factory was provided for review by Future Friends Games.