The Cabin Factory review: one frightfully good idea, masterfully done

The design of The Cabin Factory is a masterclass in how to do a lot with very little. Cast as a new employee at said factory, you descend in a lift to the production floor while being told by a robotic voice that a few customers have complained that the cabins they’re receiving are haunted. Hence, it’s your role to provide some much-needed quality assurance.

Your new job is to simply wander into the cabins as they roll up on a giant conveyor belt, then check them carefully to see whether anything is amiss. If all is fine, head back out and hit the green ‘Clear’ button. But if you spot anything moving inside, it’s time to run for your life and smash the red ‘Danger’ button as fast as you can.

The layout of each cabin is identical, and they all tend to have the same standard décor, including an alarmingly creepy portrait of a woman, a mannequin of a man eating his lunch and a child-sized dummy upstairs with a cloth over its head. Which does lead you to wonder who on earth is buying these incredibly creepy cabins. Still, the absurdity of it all is key to the appeal. And I marvelled at how much variety and interest can be generated from the endless recycling of this one cabin.

The Cabin Factory review: who you gonna call?

Because you’re told to watch out for any movement, you find yourself scrutinising the cabins intensely: and any change, even tiny, can be momentous. Like when the lunch-eating mannequin swivelled its head slightly in my direction, prompting a deluge of expletives on my part and a panicked dash to the exit.

Conversely, the décor of the cabin can alter subtly, or sometimes massively, but this isn’t necessarily a sign of a haunting. At one point, to my horror, a mannequin of a girl turned up underneath the stairs, arms outstretched through the steps. But she didn’t move, so the building was merely deeply unsettling rather than haunted.

At times, though, the cabin becomes utterly unhinged. I don’t want to spoil anything about these ingenious little episodes, since the surprise is key to their appeal. But I will say that the hauntings can lead in some unexpected directions, and even extend beyond the confines of the cabin itself.

The aim is to correctly identify eight cabins in a row as either haunted or not haunted, which is easier said than done. Partly, this is because some of the more lethal hauntings can result in your death if you’re not quick enough to leg it back outside, resetting the counter to zero.

But it’s also easy to miss some of the more subtle hauntings, like the odd leg twitch, or objects switching positions when you turn your back. And that’s what’s so clever about the concept: you’re encouraged to be hyper-alert for absolutely anything out of the ordinary, so when something does happen, it can be pant-wettingly scary.

The layout of the cabin cleverly heightens the tension, too. The narrow entrance corridor doesn’t let you see all the way into the main interior, and your view is constantly occluded by walls that you have to edge around, never knowing what’s lurking around the corner. The S-shaped layout also makes fleeing the cabin that bit harder, especially if you’ve made it all the way upstairs.

The Cabin Factory review: genuinely terrifying

I’ll admit to being too frightened to open the door on a number of occasions, unwilling to perform my QA duties once again after a particularly harrowing episode. Yet I found The Cabin Factory both unique and compelling. It’s not a long experience: with nerves of steel, you could probably finish the whole thing in an hour.

But The Cabin Factory is easily one of the most memorable games I’ve played in a long time, and absolutely perfect for an evening in with friends, as you egg each other on and whip each other into a frenzy. “Check the painting, check the painting. Are the eyes moving? Hold on, what’s that over there? Ohmygodohmygod run, RUN!”

The Cabin Factory review: verdict

Beautifully simple by design and executed just as deftly, The Cabin Factory is a genuinely creepy, occasionally terrifying, play on space, design and things that go bump in the night (and in weird factories). Chilling.