The Pines is one of those newly announced games that does not seem interested in disappearing into the crowd. Studio Abattoir‘s open-world RPG with psychological horror elements is built around two big promises: that your decisions will carry real weight, and that the story will not simply frame the experience, but drive it from beginning to end.
The game follows Edward Walker, a former detective left emotionally gutted by a case he could not solve. Exhausted and desperate for some kind of peace, he heads to The Pines, a secluded mountain retreat recommended by his therapist, a place that initially looks calm, quiet, and carefully designed to help people recover. That calm does not last very long. Very quickly, the retreat turns into something far more hostile, marked by disappearances, unsettling glances, evasive answers, and the growing feeling that almost everyone here knows more than they are willing to say. The influence of Alan Wake is obvious in the atmosphere, but the project clearly wants to build its own identity rather than stop at imitation.
Although The Pines Resembles Alan Wake, Investigation Matters More Here
The biggest difference is that investigation is not treated as a supporting flavor element, but as the foundation of the entire game loop. Players are expected to piece together what happened in The Pines through testimony, clues, rumors, and fragments of buried history. According to the game’s description, nothing will point you neatly in the right direction, nobody is fully transparent, and every conversation may carry truth and manipulation at the same time. That makes the promise of meaningful choices feel more central than usual, because decisions are tied directly to how you interpret the world and who you decide to trust inside it.
This is reinforced by what the game calls the Stalker System, a dynamic mechanic that reacts to your actions in ways that can change the behavior of the people around you. Characters who initially seem harmless may become hostile depending on what you do. In some cases they may simply refuse to speak to you any longer, while in others they may turn into direct threats. In other words, The Pines is not just saying that choices matter in a superficial, marketing-friendly sense. It is presenting a world that is supposed to answer back to the player, and not always gently.
At the same time, Studio Abattoir is making it clear that this is not meant to be a passive horror experience where you simply walk from clue to clue. If violence breaks out, the combat is described as raw and direct, centered on melee weapons such as bats, axes, and improvised tools. Each weapon comes with different weight and timing, which means the game wants players to read situations carefully instead of mashing their way through them. The Steam description also points to character progression, skills, factions, and open-world exploration as major parts of the package, suggesting that the RPG side is meant to do more than just support the mystery – it is also there to shape Edward Walker into a reflection of how the player chooses to approach the nightmare.
Right now, The Pines looks like a project trying to combine psychological horror, detective work, open-world exploration, and consequence-driven RPG structure into one coherent experience. The echoes of Alan Wake and Wayward Pines are easy to spot, but the game’s real hook is the way it wraps suspicion, uncertainty, and player choice into the core of the design. There is still no release date beyond the studio’s promise that it is coming soon. Even so, if Studio Abattoir can deliver on the ideas it is currently outlining, The Pines could easily turn into one of those darker, lower-profile games that end up making far more noise than people first expected.
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