I had been waiting for The Cabin Factory and other The Exit 8-likes for console release, as many indie games have made it over to consoles; small developers working on console release sound impossible, but it is the new norm. But I thought to jump aboard early from the traditional Steam side, as there were some interesting tidbits.

I have prefaced some of the limitations of Exit 8-likes in a different post. The Cabin Factory introduces different style of gameplay, where the player is no longer concerned about finding anomalies — the task is now finding “haunted” cabins, hence the title of the game, and the job title of the protagonist’s. It enables the game to introduce an environment that is entirely foreign at whim, whereas the traditional Exit 8 rules would have made players run for the “danger” button soon as they saw something changed. So long as the objects in the cabin aren’t moving, it’s considered a “safe” cabin. The game doesn’t do justice in explaining its new system, however, as I’ve seen more YouTubers struggling to adjust to it.

The new system enables the game to introduce more in depth lore; and more lore, for horror games, usually means more contents. Players don’t have to act like main characters from horror movies. For example, some of the cabins may be irregular, in that it doesn’t follow the usual layout; however, your job as the inspector is focused on finding out whether or not the cabin is haunted, not whether the client has ordered extra props. Some of the cabins may seem completely haunted, only for it to turn out to be safe. While the others appear quite benign until the very last moment.

What I did struggle to understand in the game was its poor optimization. The game is bound to stutter as the new, giant cabin is rushed in to the factory floor. For the life of me, I do not understand why the game wasn’t optimized for the most frequently played animation in the entire game. Imagine the elevator room from Portal 2 was struggling to load, and that game came out in 2011.

Conclusions: New Twist for Exit 8-Likes

The Cabin Factory was the game I wanted to try out on PC, despite my console-centric play style. It has balanced out its anomalies, the randomness of anomalies, and the amount of lores. The game is definitely delivering more detailed anomalies, in richer environment, and heck, it even wrote a rule that is forgiving to introduce more anomalies. There is more to be desired about the optimizations, but with its indie price and an experimental game design, The Cabin Factory is certainly a good contender for what Exit 8-likes can be.