This time the terror is real. Lakeview Cabin 2
is a direct sequel to Lakeview Cabin and Lakeview Cabin Collection. Unlike the previous games, which primarily took place in the universe of the Lakeview Cabin horror movie franchise, Lakeview Cabin 2 takes place in the real world.
Lakeview Cabin 2 also differs from the Lakeview games that were released in the past with upgraded graphics (though still maintaining the nostalgic pixel art) and character design, as well as co-op multiplayer being available. Like Lakeview Cabin Collection, this game consists of a hub level with its own characters and goals where the four episodes can be accessed.
Currently in early access mode on Steam, Lakeview Cabin 2 became available to players on October 30, 2020, along with the first episode which focuses on a family at a high-end cabin. The second episode became available in April 2021, taking place at a haunted hotel.
Lakeview Cabin 2 generally presents the following tropes:
- Amusement Park of Doom: This is where the hub takes place, with four children free to explore an abandoned amusement park which, in itself, is not particularly sinister. However, below the amusement park, the Dweller lingers and, around him, are so many dead children that the whole place is buzzing with flies.
- Anyone Can Die: In true Lakeview Cabin fashion, any of the characters can be killed.
- Bloody Horror: There is the potential for some horrific deaths in this game.
- Creepy Child: Upon witnessing something traumatic, the children are initially upset, but then something happens that makes their eyes turn white as they continue experiencing the horrors that await them.
- Creepy Crows: Crows show up around the house and, at times, inside the children's bedrooms, suggesting that they were let inside when something else made its way into the house.
- Final Girl: If all of the playable characters die except for a female character, then she qualifies as this if she makes it to the end alive.
- Flies Equals Evil: The area below the amusement park has a swarm of flies buzzing around the entrance. This is revealed to be due to all the dead children rotting in the darkness.
- The family in the first episode drives past roadkill that is covered with flies. The flies leave it and follow the family instead...
- The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: After the Dweller is hit by the silver harpoon and the orb (acquired after completing the first episode), it leaps towards you (the player) and then starts pounding on the screen, which begins cracking. The Dweller knows that you are trying to kill it, and wants to returns the favor.
- Full-Frontal Assault: While this is always an option in Lakeview games, it actually serves a purpose in the first episode, as Sockhead gets distracted if he sees the wife naked.
- Jump Scare: This happens when you go into the basement, which is completely dark, and traverse it to get to the light switch. Babyface's face flashes from the shadows, along with his signature wail, but turning the light on reveals that it is simply a life-sized Babyface statue with a speaker activated by motion detection.
- Kill It with Fire: The aliens who invade in the first bonus episode are vulnerable to fire and explosions.
- Off with His Head!: If the playable characters are killed and then attacked after their deaths, they lose their heads.
- In the second episode, the axe can decapitate people in one swing.
- Malevolent Masked Men: Scarecrow and, to a lesser extent, Sockhead (who is just wearing a stocking over his head).
- The second episode has the terrorists hiding in hotel rooms, as well as the masked killers disguised as fans.
- Pay Evil unto Evil: The Fedora Man arrives the night after one of the parents repeatedly hurts or kills their children, and only kills the parents. Interestingly, the Fedora Man does not care if the children are killed by the killers. He just hates bad parenting.
- Scare Chord: The music changes abruptly upon entering the kitchen and discovering the fridge open and food scraps littered on the floor, indicating that someone came here before you.
- Upon seeing and being attacked by the killers, this happens, with each killer having their own Leitmotif.
- Screen Tap: A little more than a tap. If you hurt the Dweller twice, it starts pounding on the screen (which cracks with each punch) in an attempt to kill the player.
- Secret Room: There is one beneath the family's house in the first episode, accessible by going down the well and unlocking the game.
- In the second episode, there is a secret hotel room that can only be accessed if the bomb explodes on the corridor that it is on, since the room is walled up.
- Silver Bullet: While no bullets have appeared yet, there is a silver harpoon in the hub, and a silver necklace and silver particles generated by the lighter in the first episode. All silver objects can be used as weapons against enemies.
- Silver Has Mystic Powers: Silver objects have the ability to kill certain foes. In the hub level, stabbing the Dweller in the back with the silver harpoon is one of the only ways to weaken it.
- In the first episode, the witches are instantly killed as soon as they come into contact with the silver necklace found beneath the floorboards of the barn.
- Would Hurt a Child: The cultists will pick up your kids and throw them into the lake to drown.
- The Dweller kills the children who come to the amusement park and are curious enough to find it.
Episode 1 also holds examples of:
- Abusive Parents: The parents, as playable characters, can be controlled into harming and/or murdering their own children as part of the game's potential for player cruelty.
- Of course, this can also work the other way around, too.
- Alien Episode: The first episode's bonus level has the family taking on a group of murderous aliens.
- Babies Make Everything Better: The parents appear to be expecting or trying for another baby, judging by the calendar in the kitchen and the pregnancy test in the bathroom.
- They eventually get their wish, although it remains to be seen whether having Red as a son makes anything better or so much worse.
- Back from the Dead: At the end of the first episode, Red returns to the land of the living as the family's new baby. Depending on the ending, this baby either ends up being raised by the parents or the cult that comes from across the lake.
- Bald of Evil: Beneath his mask, Scarecrow is a bald man who resembles Pluto from The Hills Have Eyes.
- Bandaged Face: The Fedora Man's face is covered with bandages to hide the skinless face beneath.
- Bearded Baby: When Red is reincarnated as a baby, he retains his moustache.
- Booby Trap: The family can set up elaborate traps in order to kill the enemies. In fact, the first episode can be completed with no casualties in the family simply by setting up traps involving multiple items that have been saved in their position on the map and then activated by the enemies walking past them, as seen here.
- Born-Again Immortality: Presumably due to the curse on Red's bloodline, causing his movie counterpart to return in different incarnations, Red comes back to life as a baby and is possibly his own descendant.
- Breeding Cult: The witches that dwell in the cabin across the lake seem to have this as their goal, (i.e. birthing an incarnation of Red), though despite flashing each other, they do not breed with one another and instead target the family in hopes of having the wife give birth to Red instead.
- Creepy Basement: The basement of the house itself is not creepy, aside from a jump scare that turns out to be harmless. The underground chamber beneath the house, however, shows shelves stacked with jars of fetuses and some kind of torture device and a bucket with blood stains. Anything that took place here happened some time ago, but just the imagery is disturbing enough for one to assume what happened…
- Deadly Road Trip: The family gets a lot more than they bargained for when they arrive at their holiday house.
- Deliberately Monochrome: The first bonus episode is black and white like an old movie.
- Distracted by the Sexy: This happens to Sockhead if he sees the wife naked or the sexy magazines.
- Enclosed Extraterrestrials: The aliens who invade the family's property in the bonus episode are enclosed within their spacesuits, which include glass helmets to cover their elongated heads. This renders them hard to set ablaze (aside from explosions), though their helmets can be temporarily destroyed, making them vulnerable to fire.
- Enfant Terrible: Remains to be seen. Red returns a baby, but is either seen sleeping peacefully with the family, or squalling horrifically as it emerges from its dead mother with the cult.
- Evil Old Folks: Granny seems like a sweet old lady who cheerfully hops over to the kids… so she can grab them and drown them in the lake.
- Eye Scream: One of Granny's eyes pops out of its socket when she dies.
- Extreme Libido: Sockhead, who hides inside the cupboard in the barn initially. His hideout has women's underwear strewn across the floor and a nude calendar on the wall, and his bed at the cultists' cabin is covered with used tissues and socks, and what is probably
ejaculate.- Additionally, this proves to be his weakness, as Sockhead can be distracted by vintage porn magazines, or the wife if she gets naked.
- Fetus Terrible: There is a fetus stuck in a jar in the secret chamber beneath the house. If the jar breaks and the fetus is set loose, it crawls around screaming horrifically.
- When the wife's corpse gives birth in front of the cult, Baby!Red is monstrous with sharp teeth and a monstrous screech that sounds eerily like Babyface from Collection.
- First-Episode Resurrection: By the end of the first episode, Red has returned from the dead.
- Guilt-Based Gaming: This happens if you repeatedly try to remove a child's clothes in the first episode, as doing so makes them upset and traumatized. Makes you wonder why you tried to get a child naked in the first place.
- Human Sacrifice: The cultists want to kill you and drown your children in the lake as a tribute to their gods.
- Madwoman in the Attic: Granny hides in the attic when the family first arrives, though she will descend into the house on the second night (or if the attic hatch is opened).
- Media Transmigration: Inverted. Although the universe depicted in Lakeview Cabin and Lakeview Cabin Collection is that of a horror movie franchise, the events are somewhat based on reality. That being said, the version of Red that is resurrected is identical to the movie version and thereby is likely an amalgamation of the movie Red and the "real" Red.
- Microwave Misuse: Putting a metal item in the microwave and then turning it on makes it explode. This can prove to be useful in dealing with enemies effectively.
- Permadeath: If any of the playable characters die, they stay dead until the game is restarted.
- Plant Aliens: The aliens who arrive to kill the family in the first episode's bonus part seem to have evolved from corn. When they are set ablaze, popcorn bursts from their heads.
- Protect This House: Cultists have come to your house to kill you and your family, and rigging the place with booby traps and/or gathering weapons to defend yourselves is the only way to get out alive.
- Sackhead Slasher: Scarecrow's mask is essentially a sack that resembles a scarecrow's head.
- Scary Scarecrows: Scarecrow dresses like one, including wearing a mask. There is a real scarecrow of sorts on the other side of the lake, with what appears to be a skull as a head.
- Shark Man: There is a man with shark-like attributes lurking in the lake that tries to attack the family as they cross it. He can destroy the family's boat and attempts to kill any of the family members who are in the water with him.
- Stocking Mask: Sockhead wears one of these, hence his nickname.
- Super Drowning Skills: While the parents can swim, the children cannot and die if in the water for too long.
- Torture Cellar: Very likely one of the uses of the underground chamber beneath the house, if the blood is any indication.
- Womb Horror: In one of the first episode's bad ending, the wife's corpse gives birth to a monstrous baby version of Red while the cult watches.
- Weaksauce Weakness: If you hurt your children — on purpose or on accident — a man in a fedora will come to kill only the adults. How do you deal with this man, who can't be killed by blowing him up, setting him on fire, or shooting/hitting him? You fix the Sauna — which is a thing that normally exists to heal all your wounds — and turn it on when he's in there, and he just dies. Seriously.
Episode 2 shows instances of:
-
All-Star Cast: Played with — the concept for this episode is that you're playing as the actors who starred in the Lakeview Cabin Horror Movies, meaning you have 8 characters to rescue this time. - Assassination Attempt: The disguised killers are trying to kill all the actors, and succeed unless you know how to identify them and can escape from them or kill them first.
- The Bartender: Red's ghost, of all people, who shows up at the bar if you are insane enough wearing the hotel uniform. However, instead of offering you drinks, he gives you an axe.
- The Bus Came Back: The man in the penthouse is the man from the epilogue in Lakeview Cabin Collection.
- Chair Reveal: In the penthouse, when you interact with the chair, it reveals a skeleton seated on it.
- Collapsing Lair: The Hotel's ultimate fate in the third ending — interacting with the skeleton also gives you all three keys to the exit, and the hotel starts collapsing as you basically have to run all three keys downstairs while a giant green ghost chases you, and the Hotel completely collapses after all the actors escape.
- Fan Convention: The Hotel is full of innocent people cosplaying as the Lakeview Cabin series characters, but unfortunately, that just makes it easier for the killers to hide.
- Ghastly Ghost: The ghosts that show up are ghastly and prove to be an obstacle (circling the people they come into contact with), but are harmless.
- Played straight with the giant green ghost from the penthouse, who rips you to pieces if you get in his way.
- Greater-Scope Villain: The man in the penthouse seems to be behind the disguised killers trying to murder the actors, as he seems to regenerate and become empowered when the actors are all dead.
- However, at the very top of the building (above the penthouse), a young Red is watching everything from the shadows.
- Groin Attack: Using the candles this way is the only way to defeat the giant green ghost.
- Hell Hotel: Hotel Lakeview is a hotel, wherein lurks murderous terrorists, disguised killer cultists, ghosts, and secret rooms with dark secrets.
- Inn Security: As stated above, the hotel is fraught with dangers for those who stay there.
- I See Dead People: Though only those who have lost enough of their sanity can see the ghosts.
- Reduced to Dust: The mysterious figure watching from the penthouse disintegrates if all of the actors survive and escape.
- Sinister Shades: One of the disguised killers wears these in their true form.
- Spree Killer: The terrorists have no qualms about who they kill, shooting up the entire corridor outside their rooms.
- Stealing from the Hotel: There are numerous items lying around in hotel rooms and storage closets that can be picked up and used.
- The Guards Must Be Crazy: The Hotel actually has armed security guards, so surely they can handle the killer situation, right? Wrong! They either outright ignore if you have a weapon (and die to the killers) or will shoot you for having a weapon/misbehavior. This makes them more of a threat to you, since you have to dodge and/or smuggle guns past the guards (the ones that care, anyway) and deal with the Killers yourself.
Episode 3 also holds examples of:
- Bag of Sharing: There's some sort of cupboard/box that allows the seemingly separate films to send items to each other.
- Being Watched: An interesting detail is that while we're back to 4 characters again, each man is being watched by a woman in the background for some reason. Most of the films have a guessable reason for this (in one film, the girl is behind the barn fence; another has the girl just sitting in the car bored because it's broken down), but it's anyone's guess as to why the other ladies are there.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: Episode 3 can get INCREDIBLY Meta due to it's Twilight-Zone inspired premise, to the point it's actually hard to figure out what the hell is actually going on... which seems to be intentional.
- Car Fu: There's a drivable combine harvester in the Farm Film, and you can use it to run over and promptly shred to pieces that thing that's locked inside your barn.
- Conspiracy Theorist: Considering how meta this episode is, it's definitely to dig at the people trying to figure out the series's lore. The board at the very end has some interesting◊ details to be sure.
- Deliberately Monochrome: The film involving the Barn is deliberately black and white. It's the only film that really does this — each character has a different filter for their film.
- Go Mad from the Revelation: One of the endings has the old man watching the show become a crazy conspiracy nut over the Lakeview Cabin series, and burns himself alive alongside all his evidence.
- Mad Scientist Laboratory: One of the Film locations is actually this. In an interesting play on this, you're expected to bring the monster to life — the puzzle is in finding out how to do so, and then how to survive the monster you just unleashed.
- Pop the Tires: One of the films has the characters get a flat tire right out in the middle of nowhere. Yes, you can fix this flat tire, drive away, and end up crashing into another film.
- Rise from Your Grave: An interesting variant — if any of your characters die, they do come back as a considerably unstoppable zombie that is actually quite hard to avoid since they can follow you. However, the episode itself doesn't punish you for letting all 4 characters die, since the old man watching just restarts the TV for you to play the episode again.
- Show Within a Show: This time around, the setting is that you're playing inside seemingly disconnected films that an old man is watching on TV which is about the In-universe fictional films of Lakeview Cabin. It's very much like an episode of the Twilight Zone with how meta it is.
- Sword of Plot Advancement: The other Ending of this episode involves figuring out how to find the pieces of, and then make one of these.
- The Bus Came Back: The man from the epilogue of the previous game actually returns as the "narrator" for this episode — he even shows up again if one of the films ends "correctly", complete with a fake credits sequence.
- If the robot's body, the yuppie's girlfriend's head, the blob's brain, and the radioactive egg are combined, then the machine will turn into Eleanor. Walt/The Narrator will look back and forth between the studio and the camera with his mouth agape while Eleanor becomes angry before teleporting and ripping off Walt's head. Afterwards, only his skeleton will appear when he would normally show up.
- Trapped-with-Monster Plot: In an interesting twist, there are no human killers in this Episode. There are some monsters to deal with instead; the farm has a Giant Chicken thing locked in the barn, in the penthouse, you get gifted a giant killer robot, and in the Mad Science lab, you can bring a Giant Slime thing to life… and you can also kill the little dog as well, since if it runs away, it'll likely go straight to the toxic waste and, well, you're not going to have a little dog anymore.
- Toxic Waste Can Do Anything: There is a bunch of dumped toxic barrels in one of the films, and it's possible to irradiate items such as bones by dropping them on it and in fact, one of the things you should do is go to this site to immediately file away the radioactive bone so the little dog can't eat it and become a problem.
- Trojan Horse: One of the films has this ridiculously huge present that will appear for you to open if you answer the phone. Go ahead, do it, there's definitely nothing inside this big, mysterious box. It's required to open, by the way, but you do get an opportunity to prepare yourself for what's inside — just remember that electronics explode when wet and there's a spray bottle in the penthouse.
Episode 4 also holds examples of:
- After the End: the Episode takes place in a post-apocalyptic Wasteland, and your 4 survivors are driving through, picking up supplies as they go, to get to the end point on them map.
- Big Badass Rig: This is how the survivors drive around - it's got a lot of various functions in it's interior, and it is apparently fueled by poop
- I'm a Humanitarian: While there ARE cannibals in the wastelands, you yourself can butcher people and eat their flesh if you so choose - the replicator IS fueled by poop, so you might be tempted to butcher your enemies into tiny, edible pieces so you can generate an item you may really want/need
- Nothing but Skulls: the end point itself is LITTERED with skeletons and skulls of people who have failed to get past what lies there, and if YOU fail the 4 survivors end up the same way.
- Shout-Out: To Mad Max, most obviously
