This Spooky Job Sim Combines Several Of My Favorite Games With A Twist

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.