The Cabin Factory PS5 Review 9.5/10 "A beautifully designed bite-sized horror that’s a must play for fans of the genre" 🛖 @ICS_indie #IndieGame #GameDev

As long time readers will know, I’m a (blood) sucker for short horror games. I love settling down and knowing I’ll be watching the credits roll in an hour or two and will get a short blast of unsettling thrills. Combine that with the fact that The Cabin Factory costs less than half a pint of lager, and we are very much onto a winner.

I’m purposely not going into the game that much here as discovering it is where a lot of the fun lies, all you need to know is that this is a first-person 3D horror game in which you play an older lady that begins The Cabin Factory in a lift en route to the huge aeroplane hangar-like room in which she will be performing her job…checking if cabins that roll up on a conveyor belt are haunted or not. There are two buttons marked ‘danger’ and ‘clear’, and if you get eight cabins correct on the trot – you finish the game, it really is that simple.

Of course…you have to go in the cabins (all of which are variations on a theme, again – I’m trying to keep it vague here) and walk around, paying attention to…unsettling things…and trying to spot if anything has altered, and these things range from subtle changes to things that occur that are very much – as the Persians used to say – ‘not subtle’.

I was tense playing this game. I had the sound up high, and my wife and I were passing the controller back and forth with each cabin, and I was genuinely glad to get a break from being in control after some of the things that happened, I ran out of some of those cabins, let me tell you – wishing there was a third button to press that was labelled ‘Haunted to F*** and back’. 

This is a blend of jump scares (including one ‘secret’ one that got me) and a more encroaching terror, and whilst the game plays itself out in an hour or so, I absolutely adored it, from the smoothness of animations and visuals through to the incredibly simplistic controls and gorgeous audio design. 

The way in which the mood switches from a bright white, corporate, squeaky clean warehouse to a foreboding, terrifying cabin with wind – and other sounds – howling as you make your way through the small spaces is a masterclass in vibe, and tension is high here. I’ve seen this lobbed in with a few other games I’ve played in the ‘liminal space’ genre, and I heartily disagree with those assessments because:

This is good

I wasn’t wandering around, bored.

SUMMARY
An almost perfect little horror game that is tightly designed, based on a fantastic premise that is realised almost to its fullest and runs well with great audio and visuals. 

Good!

9.5/10

🧊🆒ICE COOL🧊🆒

(also available on PC, Xbox, Switch)

Developer - International Cat Studios

Publisher - Future Friends Games