ORDER 13 Review – In this warehouse, no one can hear you scream

I love a simple but solid concept, especially when it’s well executed. Haunted warehouse? Sure, sounds good. Sign me up. And that’s exactly what we’re getting with today’s review specimen: ORDER 13 is a first-person horror game where you take on the role of a lone warehouse worker and have to locate, package and send off various items to your company’s customers. Feels simple enough, no? You just print out your order, find the necessary shelf in the warehouse, take the required item back to your office and send it off in a box. Well, yes, it would be very simple if you were a regular warehouse worker, and this was a regular warehouse. But remember: you’re in a horror game. Nightmarish creatures lurk in the shadows of the building, turning an otherwise mundane job into a quest for constant survival – but hey, at least you have your cat for company. That has to count for something, right?

Graveyard shift

So how does everything work? Well, it’s pretty much what I outlined above. The orders you print out tell you which shelf you need to locate, and what code you need to enter on the keypad to access the required item from the warehouse. The code is something you have to remember, but there’s nothing stopping you from taking a screenshot of it, so... you know. I have a terrible memory for these things, so cut me some slack. Finally, there’s also a daily quota to meet in terms of how much money you have to make from deliveries, which gets bigger and bigger as days pass, forcing you to get more items and spend more time in the dark. You know, where the monsters are.

Anyway, as you make your way across the warehouse, spooky things begin to happen – at first, it’s just a few unsettling noises, but then things get more and more out of control as the days advance, and suddenly, you’re playing an Alien: Isolation-inspired game of hide-and-seek with a mutated abomination that wants to drink your bone marrow for breakfast. You do all this while also trying to complete orders, which, by the way, take you deeper and deeper into the warehouse as the game progresses, meaning that the more you play, the farther away you’ll be from the safety of your office. There’s also a ticking timer element to the game, represented by the health bar of your pet cat, which gradually decreases while you’re out exploring the warehouse, and only stops when you return to your safe room. This means each excursion into the bowels of the warehouse has to be planned to a certain extent, and you have to constantly weigh your options – “Do I grab three items, or just two? Do I have enough time for this? What if the monster shows up?” And so on.

Honestly, while the game does use a few jump scares and loud noises here and there, it still manages to be very tense and genuinely atmospheric. Dark, empty warehouses are already scary on their own, and when there’s a zombified killer shuffling about between the shelves... well, palms can get sweaty. My only complaint is that I would’ve appreciated an ever so slightly slower buildup to the monster’s reveal – the game, in my opinion, could’ve spent just a tiny bit more time on the creepy audiovisual scares before letting the creature loose in the warehouse, but maybe that’s just me. As a side note: the monster, much like the Xenomorph in the previously mentioned Alien: Isolation, has very loud and distinctive footsteps, so you can always tell if it’s nearby. However, the sound design of this felt somewhat off. Specifically, it wasn’t always clear to me which direction the boogeyman would come from, or exactly how far away it was from me based on the sounds I was hearing. It wasn’t a huge issue in the grand scheme of things, but it did cause some confusion here and there.

The thing in the basement

Within your office, you also have access to various upgrades that can be purchased with the money you make from your deliveries. This includes items that increase your cat’s health bar (essentially giving you more time to spend in the warehouse before having to return to the safe room), a backpack that lets you carry multiple items at once, better shoes for faster running, and so on. As you accumulate more funds, you’ll also unlock additional areas in the warehouse itself, most notably its extremely haunted basement – and this is where the difficulty sort of ramps up a bit. In a good way, I mean.

While the main warehouse is decently spacious and gives you plenty of opportunities to steer clear of the monster, the basement is tiny and cramped by comparison, so expect to get really up close and personal with him at times. There were even a few occasions when I was inputting a code on a keypad while the creature was shuffling around on the other side of the shelf, only a few feet away from me; similarly, I had a number of instances where a cleverly placed jump scare made me drop the item I’d been carrying, forcing me to waste time by going back to pick it up. It’s also worth noting that the arrangement of the shelves is slightly more confusing in the basement: while the main warehouse keeps its rows of shelves in an easy-to-digest, alphabetical order, the basement is sort of... all over the place. This makes it harder to find the item you’re looking for, leading to more tension, more panic, and more potential monster encounters. Long story short, this game definitely knows what it’s doing, and I was having a surprising amount of fun with it.

Closing thoughts

Overall, I enjoyed ORDER 13 quite a bit. The core gameplay loop may seem repetitive at first, but once you unlock some upgrades and venture down into the basement, things get a lot more exciting. It’s tons of fun to manage your time while playing hide-and-seek with the monster, taking increasingly bigger risks in order to meet your quota or earn some extra cash – even if it means repeatedly going back into the lion’s den. I enjoyed planning my daring excursions into the most haunted depths of the warehouse, and it felt really satisfying when I finally made it back to the safety of my office and could breathe a genuine sigh of relief. Sure, the monster’s design could’ve been better, and the time limit mechanic might annoy some people, but if what I described above sounds fun to you, then do absolutely give ORDER 13 a chance. You might end up being pleasantly surprised.