After what felt like a lifetime of essays, lectures, and caffeine-fuelled writing sessions, I finally submitted my final university assignment. To celebrate the occasion (and to claw back a bit of joy after all that academic slog), I bought myself a Steam Deck. I mentioned this in a previous blog post, but honestly, it’s worth repeating: this little device is a game-changer. I wanted something portable, powerful, and fun—and it’s delivered on all fronts.
One of the first games I picked up for it was The Cabin Factory, an indie horror game (released December 2024) that I stumbled across a while ago (I forget where… maybe TikTok). The title alone had me curious, and I’m glad I took the plunge. It’s strange, tense, and quietly brilliant.
In The Cabin Factory, you’re cast as a factory worker with a very odd job: inspecting cabins that come down a conveyor belt, one by one. Each cabin looks the same from the outside—wooden, rustic, and eerily still. Your task is simple: enter the cabin and assess whether it’s haunted. But of course, it’s never quite that straightforward.
Once inside, things start to unravel. Figures you thought you saw disappear when you turn your head. Rooms reconfigure themselves. Doors that were locked suddenly pull you in, like something wants you to go deeper. Radios sputter with static, muttering phrases you can’t quite understand. Televisions flicker to life with distorted footage that makes your skin crawl. Sometimes the changes are subtle—just enough to make you question whether anything’s really happening. Other times, they’re overt and violent. Either way, the deeper you go into the shift, the more these identical-looking cabins twist into uniquely terrifying spaces.
That’s one of the game’s strengths: how it plays with repetition and escalation. Each cabin begins as a blank slate, but the tension builds with each visit. The further you progress, the more the cabins distort, and the more malevolent they become. The game creates this fantastic feeling of dread, not through cheap jump scares, but by constantly unbalancing you, making you second-guess what you saw, what you heard, and whether you should risk stepping inside the next one.
It plays beautifully on the Steam Deck. The controls are intuitive and responsive, and the graphical style—minimalist but atmospheric—really suits the smaller screen. There’s something about holding horror in your hands that makes it feel more intimate, more intense. I played it in the morning and with plenty of light, even still, because I ended up staring intently at the screen and listening, trying to figure out what changed, I was still jumping. I bet playing it at night with headphones on will really crank up the terror. Maybe I’ll try that next… maybe… probably not.
The only real downside is that if you sit and play it in one long session, the loop can start to feel a little repetitive. But honestly, it’s one of those games that benefits from taking your time—play a few cabins, take a break, then come back when you’re ready to be unsettled all over again. It’s not about sprinting to the end; it’s about soaking in the eeriness. And in the end, you only need to correctly clear 8 cabins for the game to play out, but each playthrough can be vastly different.
The Cabin Factory isn’t trying to reinvent horror gaming, but it takes a simple premise and runs with it in all the right directions. If you’ve just picked up a Steam Deck and want something short, creepy, and clever to break it in, this is a fantastic choice. It doesn’t rely on gore or over-the-top horror tropes—just good, old-fashioned dread, delivered in small wooden doses.
Rating: 8/10
Moody, minimalist, and seriously creepy. A perfect little horror gem for your Steam Deck library.
The Cabin Factory is available on Steam for £2.49/$2.99/€2.99
Gareth Ellis - Author 