In assembly line horror The Cabin Factory, you search freshly-built holiday homes for ghosts
Genius loci
The Cabin Factory is described as a horror game but it's sort of about deciding whether you are, in fact, playing a horror game. There is indeed a factory and it does indeed produce cabins - jolly, Center Parcs-style affairs made of big, merry logs, which roll up fully constructed on a conveyor belt. Your job is to enter and inspect them in first-person. What are you inspecting them for? Ghosts.
If you see anything paranormal, scoot on back to the factory floor and hit the red button to condemn the structure. If the building appears normal, press the green one (you won't, seemingly, have to worry about other habit certification requirements, such as checking that all the kitchens have fire blankets - different department, I guess). In the event of a haunting, the predictable complication is that the spooks might not let you leave. Quite why your employer keeps accidentally building haunted houses remains to be seen. Where exactly do they get the logs for those walls?
I'm interested in The Cabin Factory partly because it could be an amazing prank. Maybe none of the cabins harbour ghosts! Perhaps the whole thing is a vicious social experiment on the part of developers International Cat Studios, to see how many players can be induced to imagine supernatural antics.
It would be a neat way to save development resources with regard to ghoulish lighting effects, fraught violin soundtracks and such. Perhaps other self-described "horror" games could follow their example. Imagine a Silent Hill game in which Silent Hill is a perfectly unremarkable town, haunted only by the spectres players bring in with them. Hang on, isn't that what Silent Hill is anyway?
The other thing that interests me about The Cabin Factory is the precise level of eerieness that separates a haunted house from a house that just has a lot of shoddy wiring and ill-fitting carpentry. What kinds of layout, atmospheric elements, and special effects will they introduce that provoke alarm but do not kindle the certainty of an eldritch infestation? How do you tune, say, a creaking floorboard so that it sounds almost like the footfall of a poltergeist but, on reflection, is probably just a creaking floorboard? What species of rising damp looks almost, but not entirely like the Babadook?
The third thing that interests me about The Cabin Factory is that it could be a commentary on game testing. It gives International Cat Studios a certain leeway when it comes to glitches - that's interference from beyond the grave, not a misbehaving shader! I wonder if there's any odds of a licensed multiplayer mode where they wheel on houses from other, unfinished games and have you comb them for frame-rate drops styled as phantom interventions, using a PKE Meter that actually just shows you a graph of CPU activity.
The Cabin Factory is out 13th December. You can read more on Steam. The obvious movie pairing here is Cabin In The Woods.