The Lift Playtest

The Lift Playtest looks like a spooky elevator ride waiting to jump-scare you, but it plays like a genuinely satisfying handyman simulator that just happens to be set inside a research facility slowly being swallowed by cosmic decay.

Waking Up in the Institute

You’re a handyman tasked with renovating a massive research facility, referred to as the Institute, abandoned after a catastrophic incident that left it drifting and fading into oblivion along with whatever secrets caused the disaster in the first place. The current playtest build covers roughly the first two to three hours of the eventual full game, including a recently reworked Post Office level that the developers specifically called out as an area receiving continued design attention.

House-Flipping Mechanics Meet Cosmic Horror

What sets The Lift Playtest apart from a typical horror-adventure premise is how thoroughly it commits to the house-flipping half of its identity — repairing a broken light fixture, for instance, means physically opening a hatch, retrieving a replacement bulb, removing the old fixture, swapping components, and flipping the switch to confirm the fix, rather than resolving the problem through a simple menu interaction or single button prompt. That tactile, hands-on repair loop draws heavily from the “fix it” genre’s recent popularity, while the surrounding atmosphere borrows its unsettling tone from Soviet-era science fiction and SCP Foundation-style institutional dread rather than jump-scare horror.

Beginners going in expecting a scare-driven horror game consistently misjudge the pacing at first, since the opening corporate-orientation sequence — complete with a deliberately ominous power outage — exists specifically to teach players that fixing the problem, not fleeing from it, is the actual gameplay loop being established.

What’s Still Missing From This Early Build

Because this is explicitly an early work-in-progress playtest, players should expect incomplete textures, placeholder art, and missing voice lines rather than judging the current state as representative of a finished product. Controller support was added mid-playtest after initial feedback flagged its absence, and Steam Deck verification remains a stated goal for launch rather than something the current build guarantees. One frequently discussed feature among playtest participants is the ability to invite a single friend to join a session, which several players have used specifically to compare notes on how to approach the Institute’s more obscure repair puzzles together.

Does the Post Office level represent the final version of that area?

No — the developers have specifically described it as recently reworked and still subject to change, meaning the version available in this playtest build shouldn’t be treated as final content for the eventual full release.

Can you play The Lift Playtest with a controller?

Controller support was not available at the playtest’s initial launch but was added as a mid-playtest update after player feedback specifically requested it, so current builds do support controller input.

Is the game meant to be scary in the traditional jump-scare sense?

The tone leans more toward slow-building institutional dread inspired by Soviet science fiction and SCP-style mystery than direct jump scares, with the handyman repair mechanics forming the actual core gameplay loop rather than pure survival horror tension.

The Lift Playtest succeeds by refusing to pick a single genre and sticking to it, and once you’ve swapped your first light fixture inside a facility that’s actively fading out of existence around you, fixing the Institute one system at a time starts to feel like the only sane response to something that large and that wrong.