The Lift: Hands On Preview

My Video on This

https://youtu.be/LAlZAn8qzOw

What is it?

The Lift impressed me in my recent hands-on. Every once in a while, you play a game that feels like somebody bolted together three different genres, sealed it shut with duct tape, and then waved their hands over it while whispering vibes. The Lift is exactly that. Imagine The Vanishing of Ethan Carter went on a road trip with Firewatch and picked up Remedy's Control somewhere on the side of the highway. And maybe they listened to a couple BBC audio dramas along the way. I'm going to cover everything about it that I can from my 3+ hours hands-on.

The Lift is a first-person supernatural handyman simulator. So far, no lonely housewives have been waiting for me to unclog their plumbing, but I'm crossing my fingers.

In the meantime, I've been rewiring doors, putting furniture back together, restarting mysterious lifts and elevators, and I got a generator running by fueling it with a fusion-driven bumblebee. That's right. I'm running around the game world with a bumblebee that's probably putting out enough radiation to fry my nuts like two popcorn kernels. So, I ended up sprinting over, getting rid of it as fast as I could. But this game and the interactions with it are all analog. Meaning you’re opening a door, moving a contraption, rewiring a system, then putting the bumblebee inside, then doing the same thing again, then trying to align systems to get the generator running. Success is hearing that generator whistle into being, spinning like a poorly balanced tumble dryer from the 1980s, and me just sitting there wondering the entire time about my reproductive system’s future chances. But in this game, them's the breaks.

The Setup

The setup is this: you wake up from stasis to find yourself the new maintenance man in a massive abandoned scientific complex, a giant satellite of sorts. Something went wrong. The original caretaker seems to be gone. The world outside hums with strange vibes, and you're left to piece it all back together. And right away, you end up noticing the world is also designed in an almost maliciously redesigned way. Bench seats next to a generator powered by a magical atomic bumblebee the size of a toddler's head? Check. Who doesn't want to relax within spitting distance of a three-inch stinger that doubles as a car battery?

This game lives in an uncanny space where the mundane collides with the outright absurd, and it never lets you forget it. Little bits of it constantly make you question exactly what's going on here. And that mystery of the magical and mechanical actually mixes up with the dirt-on-your-hands style gameplay. That “let's get this damned thing running” feel of an oil rig.

At its heart, The Lift is about mixing different things—not in a click-menu, watch-a-bar-fill-up sense, but in the tactile analog way. You twist, you screw, you flip, and you wire. Early puzzles start pretty small—power conduits, simple connections—and then slowly scale up into motors, gear sets, and stranger contraptions. What's been refreshing is the sense of escalation. You're not thrown into random puzzles for the sake of variety; you're actually layering different skills you've used right before that, reusing what you've learned and applying them in more complex contexts. And sometimes you're doing the very mundane. It's certainly not hyper-complex, but there's enough there to keep you consistently looking around.

What I Liked

What I like the most about this is also that every object you interact with looks like it actually belongs to the game world, but is also intractable. You have none of that pixel-hunting nightmare from old adventure games where the key item is a slightly brighter pixel in a sea of gray. Here, handles, screws, panels—they all stand out just enough with the artistic design itself to invite you to tinker and also to alert you right away that you can either pick it up or read it. And tinkering is the heart and soul of the game, and reading is really the mind of it.

The game has a uniquely skewed system for commerce as well. You see, everything in the game world costs money that you need, like lights and wiring to fix boxes. Sure, you'll find some stuff along the way, but a lot of it is because you're just penniless. And because you're a mechanic, you have to end up finding a way to get that cash. So, by grabbing trash, you can take it to a trash compactor, smash it up, and boom, you get yourself a fancy futuristic metal hay penny of sorts. That can then be used to buy those items or repair different broken parts.

As you repair those items in the game world, you restore the station to power, and it builds out power in a wave. That wave needs to be a certain strength to get you to the next location in the station. But there's a hint here of something even further—a small trinket of a story about the wave going out into the universe and possibly keeping humanity or the universe going. But for the time I got to play the demo, I only got the smallest snippets around the overall construction idea and the reasons for this place existing.

Can it Nail the Landing?

And it does cause you to ask questions. Why do some items in the game world have a shimmering double-model look to them, like two tea kettles trying to occupy the same space in your dimension? There was a good deal of mystery even right up until I stopped. But during that time, I picked up on the overall look that the game wants to deliver.

The Lift leans cartoony, but with a lot of polish. It's not rough indie jank, but it's not trying to be photorealistic either. Think pretty clean lines, bold colors, and surreal edges. At times, there's the smallest echo of *Control*, but not nearly as existential. Just a tinge that swaps out that oppressive techno-dystopian gray for something easier on the eyes, but still a bit cosmic, more colorful, more approachable, but possibly still just as weird behind the scenes.

Characters you meet are equally strange. There's a cyborg trader with an abacus bolted onto his chest. And that right there tells you what the game is actually going for. Everyone, everything is part of a puzzle, part of a prop, and a little bit part of a mystery. It's an intriguing look and one that I'm hoping can carry on the mystery and whatever they're trying to actually do in this game. But I did like it.

I also enjoyed the sound. Here's the thing: you might think visuals are what set the mood in games like this, and they do, but not all of it. Some of it's the music. In Control* the soundtrack made you feel like the walls themselves just wanted you dead, or at least scared of everything.

And in The Lift, you get—well, you get sort of elevator music. Not literally, but close. It's very soft tunes, meandering chords, something that hovers between lo-fi chill beats and liminal elevator hum. No matter where I explored or what I was doing, that soundtrack lulled me into a weird false sense of calm, even though nothing leaps out to try to kill you. There's a tension at odds with that audio that I liked.

The voice acting—I haven't got to play a lot. Talked to a couple characters. So far, it's limited, but it's solid. The few characters I did meet—the mysterious overseer, the trader, the odd job giver—all deliver their lines with just enough information to pull you deeper without overselling the weirdness. They also fit solidly into the audio space so far, with really good mixing and feeling like they're actually there.

Performance

Speaking of actually being there, if the performance wasn't up to snuff, we'd have an issue with that. Early build disclaimer, sure, but it actually runs pretty decently. Stutter here or there, a hiccup when entering a new area, but nothing catastrophic. Movement does feel clunky at times, like you've got pipes catching your head, jumps that don't quite line up, the occasional “why can't I stand on this obvious box” kind of moment. But that looseness fits the world. It's not about pixel-perfect platforming. It's about improvising with what you’ve got. And so far, it's delivering well.

But what's the hook? Especially in a preview this far out, that's the question. I would say solidly, it's just mystery. Games like this live or die on atmosphere. And while the puzzle scaffolding is very solid, it's the mystery that makes you lean forward. It's that connection between the two. Propaganda posters hint at corporations pulling strings. Journals suggest the caretaker before you didn't exactly leave willingly. And every room you repair, every conduit you wire back to life, feels like you're nudging the world closer to revealing one more secret.

My huge worry for the game—a massive one at that—is that it won't continue to build on the puzzle work throughout. That it may shy away from the building of complexity from the actual scaffolding of the prior things you learn. We've seen many games do that, where they level off at a particular time and don't actually build on that complexity.

Now, is *The Lift* for everybody? No. Some of you are going to bounce right off this and its slower pace, at least as it's presented now. Its obsession with screws and panels. Its refusal to put combat front and center. But if you're the kind of person who loses hours assembling Lego sets, or you've got unreasonable excitement from tightening a bolt in VR games, this game might actually sink its hooks into you. It's not horror. It's not action. It's something else. A chill yet unsettling handyman simulator that carves out its own weird corner. I went in curious. I came out more interested than I expected. And if the devs can keep layering mystery on top of the satisfying little puzzle pieces, The Lift might actually—well—lift that genre just a notch higher.

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