Lakeview Cabin Collection Review

From the vast amount of teen horror films there are, it’s easy to spot a formula: a group of out-of-touch teens find themselves in a setting where they get picked off one by one by either a deranged killer or by an undiscovered kind of monster. Towards the end, the remaining ones always try to either escape or confront and kill the threat, but more likely than not, they won’t succeed in doing so. Lakeview Cabin Collection puts you in the shoes of the protagonists of stories like these, where you will have to try your best to get at least one of them out alive. Lakeview Cabin did Until Dawn before Until Dawn, since this game started as a Flash game back in 2013. Last year, the collection came out with the three full releases included, which attracted a fairly devoted audience. This year Finnish developer Roope Tamminem has again shown his commitment to players by releasing the beta of a new level, Lakeview Cabin VI.

This 2D horror puzzler has a lot thrown in the mix: it starts as a horror game, but as you learn and re-learn the levels and all the objects you can interact with, it gradually turns into a puzzle with loose action and stealth sections. Take Lakeview Cabin III, the first available game: when you first boot it up, it’s a weekend at the lake, with four millennials drinking, smoking and eyeing each other. Under the haze of alcohol and moonlight, you will take one of these four kids to jump onto the motorcycle and ride to the other side of the map, only to accidentally run somebody over by accident. This is where you get slightly freaked out — you just murdered one of your characters accidentally. With that anxiety eating at you in the back of your mind, you will get careless and make one of the kids amble away from the group. At that moment, all lights turn off.

As you try to fumble your way back to the cabin, dissonant music fades in, and you hear children laughing. In front of you, there is an adult-sized baby with a mask on, who has inadvertently grabbed the axe sitting by the logs, and is maniacally dashing towards your lonely character. You try to run away and toss everything you see at him, but that doesn’t stop him. Accidentally, you press the button to change characters, and go back to the peaceful cabin. When you try to go back to your isolated character, you realise that you can’t — he’s crossed out from the selection menu. As you desperately and unsuccessfully try to take down the killer, you will start finding objects that slow the killer down, or knock him down for a second, having an auspicious but disappointing ‘aha!’ moment each time.

The transition between an outright horror film to a puzzler, where you know what the dangers are but don’t know how to fight them, is enhanced by the fact that it all happens in the player’s mind. The lack of dialogues or hints guide the player to the only possible solution — find ways to hurt the murderer before he assassinates your party. You will scramble through cabins and forests to find a precious shotgun cartridge, or a box of matches to light up the fuel you’ve prepared in the middle of the camp. Once you — finally — manage to kill the killer, palms sweating and your one left character missing a leg, the game doesn’t end. That’s when you realise: that wasn’t all.

The more you play each mission and the more you die, the less threatening enemies seem and the more detail you will put into preparing the scene for the killer’s arrival. And sadly, this is when the game starts losing momentum. After dying so many times, you will have to rely on painstakingly setting up traps and choke points, playing around the AI’s behaviour, in order to beat the game. This game, for me, was not about beating the monster, but about frightfully chucking boxes and beer cans at the killer in the hopes that you can escape. Every single moment of panic is thrilling and adrenaline-pumping, but when it turns into a tower-defence it becomes a bit tedious. Generally, in order to beat all killers or escape, you have to meticulously devise a plan, and there’s little margin for error. This takes away the enjoyment of the moment-by-moment rewards of horror and frenzy, because the way to beat the level is not through improvisation and quick-thinking, but preparation and attention to detail.

The game changes up the pace in the next chapters. In Lakeview Cabin IV, you have to use the clumsy stealth system to make your way through a madhouse and a slaughterhouse, in order to gather a few fuel canisters for your van. Here, the same methodical approach is necessary to sneak past enemies or take them down — with very unpredictable behaviour —, which means that any screw-up usually makes the level unbeatable. In V, the killer shows up at your house in a reality-bending enigma, in which rules are so obscure that it’s nigh impossible to understand them and beat it. And lastly, in VI — the largest level of all, still in beta —, you find yourself in a look-alike of the USS Sulaco, under the attack of more hysteric renditions of the baby xenomorph that we know and love. This is a more traditional horror game, where you have to collect keys and weapons from all over the map to access different areas and make sure you can escape safely. Needless to say, I could not.

If you’re willing and happy to spend about a dozen tries perfecting your approach to enemies, and crafting a fool-proof method to survive, this may be the game. However, if you’re anything like me, you would find the pleasure in the frantic first few attempts, where you’re scrambling for your life. The disappointment, however, comes when you realise that this is not the way to play the game. Whereas I appreciated these few tries, I could not understand how the repetition and minutiae required to understand every bit of the level is enjoyable. Particularly when the best aspects of this game are not appreciated through this style of play — the screeching, oppressive music that fades in and out as danger approaches; the background noises, like a woman crying, that you never know for sure if you actually heard or not; the disturbing pixelated representations of torn limbs and blood-bathed sickles; the recursive tongue-in-cheek tone of each level that seems to laugh at you as the night comes and you start trembling out of fear, hinting at the comedic value of the game where there’s none.

I found in the forums that there are plenty of people that enjoy this abstract treasure-hunt: looking for objects, measuring your moves, accepting your own death for the sake of a later run-through. However, you’re not really learning the mechanics of the game and using this to your advantage, like in notoriously difficult games like FTL or Dark Souls. You’re learning how that particular level works; a level that is static and excruciatingly complex. Lakeview Cabin Collection has great design in terms of atmosphere and basic mechanics, but the late-game system required to beat the game is just too nit-picky, and stands contrary to the desperation and fear evoked by a horror film.