Job sims today encompass so many different professions, from train operator to farmer to power washer and beyond. Sometimes I enjoy those kinds of games, but I expect The Lift to be my favorite of them going forward, because it takes the job sim genre and makes it spooky and weird.
Inspired by the New Weird movement, which defines things like the SCP Foundation and Pacific Drive, The Lift casts you as a handyman who fixes benches, replaces light bulbs, and reroutes electricity in a facility that quite closely resembles the setting of Control. It’s for that reason I’ve already coined its alternate title: The Oldest House Flipper. A playtest for the game is out today on Steam, free for all players. I got to check it out last week in a hands-on demo that showed off about three hours of the game, including its earliest moments and some later stages. What I saw was a game that pulls from many of my favorites but wraps them together in a novel way.
The facility at the heart of The Lift, called The Institute, feels like it’s pulled right out of Remedy’s New Weird foray, complete with a once-orderly workspace now left mysteriously abandoned and endangered. As the “Keeper” sent in to keep things tidy, you’ll need to solve BioShock-like electricity puzzles, clean up mystical black gunk coating much of the place, and explore the world in a manner inspired by immersive sims. Particularly inspirational to the game’s designs is one of my favorite games ever made: 2017’s Prey. Finding new crafting blueprints, then dumping resources into a giant machine where it spits out new, more valuable parts, is pulled directly out of Prey–even the room that houses this multi-machine process resembles Prey’s.
The new team behind the game, Fantastic Signals, said the non-linear progression through The Facility is also meant to harken back to Prey and im-sims like it, where multiple solutions can be used to solve many problems, and where tools you unlock later in the game can alter how you interact with spaces you revisit. But all of that is joined by the odd wrapper of a job sim, making it appear like those other games I love in some obvious ways while still being quite unlike them at the same time.
In The Lift, each floor you visit has what amounts to a functionality rating. It’s your job to repair things until the floor is working as usual again. Virtual elbow grease is the name of the game. You’ll reroute the electricity to fix vending machines that spit out working light bulbs, then replace faulty ones nearby, raising your functionality rating by small bits at a time. You’ll charge a handheld vacuum-like object that removes oily coatings from benches and doorways, opening up new passageways that further aid you on your quest to fix the mysterious facility left in a state of disrepair.
The Lift is a game of pulling levers and fiddling with doo-dads in the way a lot of job sims already are. It’s a game that loves when you ask, “What’s this button do?” and doesn’t punish you for pushing those buttons, even when they lead to failure. If you run out of energy for your vacuum, you can go get more at the machine that dispenses it. If you borrowed some parts from that machine to repair something else, no worries; you can just go and undo that. The levels I saw didn’t clearly define which way I was meant to go, which left me with a sense of self-guided discovery. Reading displays and observing the effect I could have on each level taught me how I could have an effect on The Facility more than a simple tool tip could. The zig-zaggy way of problem-solving is pulled right out of immersive sims, and is a quality I’m always looking for in games. I just didn’t know I’d want it in a job sim. But so far, The Lift works (no pun intended).
The storyline that unfolds focuses on slowly unraveling the mystery of what happened to The Facility before you were sent in to fix it. Soviet-style propaganda posters line many walls, notes can be found, and these and other breadcrumbs are meant to intrigue you to finish each workday and make it to the next floor. The developers played a bit coy when, during a roundtable discussion, they were asked about the presence of enemy threats–given their comparisons to Pacific Drive, I’m expecting something more like that game’s anomalies than true “enemies,” but the jury’s still out.
There’s a lot I don’t yet know about The Lift, and frankly, given the combination of genres and very hands-on mechanics, I even find it a bit hard to describe. Luckily, the playtest is out now, so I think the best way to speak to it is how I led with it: If you’re into stuff like Control, Prey, and Pacific Drive, and you’re curious how those games would look as a job sim, you’re in luck: Fantastic Signals had the same question, and then they went and answered it themselves.
The Lift comes to PC in 2026, with console versions coming at a later date.
