the cabin game Review

A Card-Driven Haunted Cabin You Build Room By Room, Released Into Early Access With Real Rough Edges

the cabin game, developed and published by Twisted Corridor, entered Steam Early Access on August 27, 2026, at $11.99. It's a 1-to-4 player horror party game where the only way out of a haunted cabin is through a deck of cards: playing them lays down new rooms, unlocks clues, and triggers environmental consequences that can just as easily kill you as help you escape. With 367 English reviews read from in a pool this large, comfortably past this review's minimum sample and drawn from an all-language total of 448 reviews sitting at 87% positive, "Very Positive" on Steam's own scale, this is a genuinely popular early release for a brand-new studio, but the pool is also candid, sometimes sharply so, about exactly how unfinished an Early Access launch it still is.

A Genuinely Clever Mashup: Blue Prince, Phasmophobia, Jumanji, And Betrayal At House On The Hill

The single most consistent thread in this review pool is enthusiasm for the concept itself, and reviewers reach for a strikingly consistent set of comparisons to describe it. "It combines Betrayal at House on the Hill the boardgame with a B-Horror Monster version of Jumanji. Takes some notes from Phasmophobia and the like," wrote one reviewer. Another put it more bluntly: "Take Blue Prince, Phasmophobia, a horror setting, add a deck building, with a cabin builder game with mystery and you got this game." A third called it "Jumanji meets Blue Prince," while yet another wrote, "UNO night... while the house is trying to kill you (at least, that's how it felt to me). The idea is genuinely clever. You play cards, build the cabin room by room, search for clues, and desperately try to escape before the game turns everyone into" something worse. Four separate reviewers landing on the same handful of touchstones, all well-regarded within their own genres, is a meaningful signal that Twisted Corridor has found a combination that actually feels fresh rather than derivative.

The Card-Built, Procedurally Assembled Cabin Is The Game's Real Hook

Per the store page, the cabin has no fixed layout: rooms are placed as players choose where to play their cards, and early placement decisions can create consequences that only surface much later in a run, with the deck reshuffled at the start of every session so no two playthroughs unfold the same way. Reviewers back this up as the game's strongest, stickiest feature. "My friends and I really enjoyed placing down the different tiles and watching the cabin come to life. Not only do you get to build the cabin of your dreams, you get to play fun little mini games throughout it," wrote one. Another called it "a challenging puzzle horror game, with an ever changing layout. Each playthrough is unique and interesting." A third wrote, "the replayabilety is insane," having bought copies for three friends already. Reported playtimes in this pool skew unusually high for a fresh Early Access release, several reviewers well past 1,000 minutes and one past 3,800, a strong practical sign that the replay loop is holding attention exactly the way its structure promises to.

Bugs, Crashes, And One Specific, Widely-Mocked Clock Sound

Set against that praise is a genuinely long list of Early Access rough edges, and reviewers are unusually specific about naming them. "I have had to quit out of three matches now, losing my time and XP, because of various bugs," wrote one. Another described a resolution setting that "literally broke my game so hard I had to get the settings/save files from a friend." Connection stability is a repeated complaint too: "it keeps disconnecting. I played it again after the update but it still disconnecting us every time. So sad," wrote one reviewer, echoed by another asking for "a rejoin option" because dropped connections were "ruining the game experience." And in a detail that shows up again and again across otherwise glowing reviews, an in-game clock's ticking sound effect has clearly gotten under players' skin: "nice game! but for the love of god... TURN THAT ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ CLOCK OFF," wrote one, with a second simply pleading, "DEAR LAWD STOP THE CLOCK." Most reviewers who raise these issues explicitly frame them as forgivable growing pains for a new Early Access title rather than dealbreakers, but the sheer specificity and repetition of the complaints suggests real, unresolved friction rather than isolated bad luck.

A Serious, Repeated Accusation: Reviewers Say The Game Is Mining Cryptocurrency In The Background

Beyond ordinary bug reports, this review pool contains a more serious and specific accusation from multiple independent reviewers: that the game is quietly consuming GPU resources far beyond what its visuals should require, with some explicitly framing it as covert cryptocurrency mining rather than mere poor optimization. "I like the concept of this game but can I have some of that bitcoin that is being mined in a background bcs why the hell I have 30-40fps and around 97% GPU usage while playin and in main menu," wrote one reviewer. A second reviewer, describing a high-end rig (an RTX 5070 Ti with a Core i9-14900K and 64GB of RAM) that runs "AAA games" fine, wrote plainly: "this game using hardware to actually mine Bitcoin... scam game don't buy this." A third, more measured reviewer stopped short of the mining accusation but still flagged the same underlying symptom: "TERRIBLE god AWFUL performance even for early access... ive got a decent rig too. i should never be hitting 30-40 frames on the lowest settings on a game like this." This review cannot independently verify whether background mining is actually occurring, that would require technical analysis this review does not have access to, but the fact that at least two reviewers independently arrived at the same specific accusation, rather than a vague "it's laggy" complaint, is worth stating plainly for any prospective buyer weighing whether to install it, and it factors meaningfully into this review's interface score.

At $11.99, A Fair Price For The Concept, If You're Willing To Tolerate Early Access Reality

On value, reviewers are broadly comfortable with the asking price given the game's current state and stated ambitions. "This game is amazing even in it's early state. A lot of variety so far for the price and has the potential to be so much more," wrote one. Another was more explicit about weighing cost against rough edges: "For a 12 dollar game (8 on release), how it came out wasn't optimized and hard to play... Amazing concept, absolutely horribly butchered execution," a review that still stopped short of asking for a refund. A third framed patience as part of the deal: "Some of the negative reviews are a little premature. This game has barely been out and is explicitly in Early Access. Bugs are going to happen." That patience is echoed by the developer's own rapid patch cadence since launch, several bug-fix and optimization updates landing within the first two weeks, suggesting active, ongoing support rather than an abandoned Early Access cash-grab.

Verdict

the cabin game arrives in Early Access with a genuinely inventive hook, a haunted cabin built card by card by its own players, that earns real, specific comparisons to Blue Prince, Phasmophobia, Betrayal at House on the Hill, and Jumanji, and reviewers who play it with friends report replay sessions stretching into the dozens of hours. But this is also, inescapably, an early and rough release: crashes, disconnects, a maddening clock sound effect, and, most seriously, a repeated, specific accusation from multiple independent reviewers that the game consumes GPU resources consistent with background cryptocurrency mining rather than ordinary poor optimization. Prospective buyers who are comfortable with active Early Access development and want to verify performance concerns for themselves before committing should treat this as a promising, actively-patched concept rather than a finished, trustworthy package; at $11.99, the idea alone is worth the price to some, but the technical concerns here are real enough that this isn't an easy, unqualified recommendation yet.