It’s odd, I think, that so few videogames focus on the tender process of repair. Restoration is satisfying in a way almost nothing else is. Taking something broken, shattered, discarded and, by careful work, returning it to purpose is inherently pleasing, like you’re reinstating a tiny bit of order in the world.
I reckon that’s why we spend so long staring at people restoring art (and carpets, for some reason) on YouTube and TikTok: they make the world make a bit more sense, convince us that everything has some kind of Platonic essence that can only ever be obscured, but not destroyed.
I say all this to explain why I have absolutely lost my gourd screwing bench seats back together in The Lift: Supernatural Handyman Simulator, a kind of Alien: Isolation by way of PowerWash Simulator game that’s currently open for playtesting. Drawing on influences like Monday Begins on Saturday (by the Strugatsky brothers, more well-known for Stalker influence Roadside Picnic), Prey, and, uh, House Flipper, The Lift puts you in the stompy rubberised shoes of a sci-fi repair guy.
You’re put to work on a huge, futuristic research facility with a faintly Soviet terroir and, who’d have guessed, it all goes wrong. Before long you’re clomping about dark, ruined halls that have been overcome by some kind of indiscernible growth, trying to establish what happened with nary but a flashlight and a screwdriver.
Which is all well and good, but the real meat of the game lies in all the broken stuff. The wrecked base is filled with missing screws, broken lightbulbs, armchairs that have been left rudely disorganised, and nowhere moreso than the titular lift itself. It’s your job to fix it all.
Also, you literally have to fix it all, because the lift won’t go until you’ve tended to it to an extent it finds agreeable. A bar along the top of the screen keeps track of your ministrations: every bulb replaced, screw fixed, baffling machine coaxed back to life fills it a little further.
This is downright narcotic for a certain kind of mind. The Lift becomes a game of hide and seek as you poke into every corner, hinge, and light fitting looking for some barely noticeable misaligned flange or whatever, anything that you could possibly attack with your screwdriver to restore function and gain another precious fraction of bar. Even once I’d sufficiently repaired the lift to get it moving, I kept hunting for things to fix. The rush was simply too much.
It helps, of course, that the vibes are very good. The Lift’s vaguely Prey-ish presentation of the future, all dolled up with Soviet-style posters and their paeans to the collective, is a much more interesting place to be than the bungalows of PowerWash Simulator or the, uh, bungalows of House Flipper. I’m quite happy to spend far too much time there replacing screws, and I’m very curious to see if The Lift can keep my interest up when the full thing releases next year.
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