While I understand the appeal of renovation sims like House Flipper, I simply cannot bring myself to play them. The idea of spending hours fixing up a fake house seems downright perverse when I cannot find time to maintain my own real, increasingly dilapidated abode.
You might say the obvious solution is to take some time off and get those many annoying odd jobs done, and you would be wrong. The solution is clearly for someone to make a game like House Flipper, but with a setting sufficiently detached from reality that I can convince myself that I am not wasting my time playing it.
It is with open arms, therefore, that I welcome The Lift, a "supernatural handyman simulator" that takes the core premise of House Flipper but switches out its crumbling bungalows and mouldy condos for a massive, Soviet-core scientific facility. It's basically Abiotic Factor for DIY sickos, and I am already buckling up my neglected toolbelt in anticipation.
You play a moustachioed engineer awakened from stasis in the bowels of the Institute, which The Lift's developer Fantastic Signals describes as "humanity's most advanced research facility—until a catastrophic incident left it drifting through the void, plagued by cosmic decay and slowly fading into oblivion."
At a glance, the Institute resembles the Talos 1 from Arkane's brilliant immersive sim Prey. But instead of sneaking around and blasting aliens with psychokinetic mind powers, The Lift tasks you with fixing up this forsaken research centre with tools, spare parts, and a big dollop of elbow grease.
The Institute is split into different floors, each of which poses a substantial renovation challenge. These range from fixing up furniture with hammers and screwdrivers, to more elaborate engineering challenges like rewiring electrical circuits. Indeed, there seems to be a substantial puzzling element to The Lift, with you digging into the guts of various bits of complex machinery, managing the torque of generators and rerouting supercomputer cabling.
Not every job is quite so down to earth (if rewiring a supercomputer can be considered mundane). The Institute is filled with strange, reality-defying locations that you'll need to use pop-up ladders and other traversal equipment to explore. Some of these locations appear to be infested by a tendril-like alien lifeform, which you can clear up using what is essentially a sci-fi vacuum cleaner.
The trailer (viewable above) is primarily a mood piece, showcasing the premise in a very watchable claymation short (though it worth noting the game doesn’t actually look like that). There is some actual footage of The Lift itself at the end of the trailer, though, and it looks like precisely what I need to further ignore the fact that my house is slowly falling down. The Lift doesn’t have a specific release date yet, but don't expect it to arrive until next year.
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