I’m not a terribly handy guy, something that’s more than once been a real problem on my bike trips. (I once got stranded in rural Virginia and had to be rescued by an old man in a truck because I… couldn’t fix a flat tire.) Despite this, I’m really into The Lift, a sort of fix-it Prey that has a playtest until the 30th on Steam.
You play as the handyperson of a research facility, a job that in the grand tradition of video games swiftly goes wrong when disaster strikes and everyone disappears. The facility, post-disaster, is in a state of disrepair, and to progress, you have to fix doors, engines, lights, and assorted furniture.
Some of these tasks are obvious–this chair is wobbly, so you need a screwdriver and a screw–while others are little spatial and logic puzzles of wires, power sources, and converters to open doors or power up machines. Everything is wonderfully tactile: a replaced lightbulb sputters to life, a listing bench straightens up, machinery whirrs and rumbles once you’ve got the right pieces in place. There are tons of buttons to press and levers to flick, and you have to physically pull drawers and doors to move them. If you can’t find the right repair bits lying around, you can craft them from recycled materials and blueprints in a machine that gave me fond flashbacks to my crafting setup in protagonist Morgan’s office in Prey, though more than once I eschewed the chore of recycling detritus and simply swapped pieces from one bit to another. As the core mechanic of the playtest, all of this fixing is incredibly satisfying to do, even when your repairs are more aesthetic than world-saving.
Atop all this is a narrative full of strange characters, guiding you through the station and into how to repair the titular lift to progress. After what is basically the game’s tutorial, the playtest shuttles you to a slice deeper into the game, where there are a ton of quests to pursue that sometimes felt a little overwhelming narratively–fix X to fix Y to do Z in ways that sometimes felt a little padded–but also mostly happened organically as I wandered around seeing what I could tinker with. The atmosphere is unsettling, but so far there haven’t been any monsters or jump scares, which I hope maintains through the full game. I’m not the best spatial reasoner, and I’d hate to do it under duress.
The game is still a work-in-progress– I don’t love the inventory system, which can be clunky to scroll through, though when you hover over an interactable object the game will often choose the right tool for the job for you, which makes things a little simpler. And to progress you sometimes need to repair enough things in an area to raise it to a certain level; there’s a narrative justification for this, and I love the contrast between fixing important machines and just changing an overhead bulb because it’s nice to have, but it sometimes felt a little bit like busywork.
But overall I was totally charmed with the time I spent in The Lift and curious to see how its puzzles and story grow in the full game. I got into the playtest simply by clicking the “request access” button on Steam; I’m sorry to be telling you about it when it ends so soon, which I didn’t realize until writing this blog, but if you miss it, The Lift is slated to come out in 2026.
