By Lucas White

Copyright shacknews

I’ve never thought too much about cryogenic sleep before I played The Lift, a new handyman simulator published by tinyBuild and developed by Fantastic Signals. Specifically, I never thought about how it might feel for something to go deeply, horribly wrong during it. But in the opening minutes of my time with a preview build, I was forced to reckon with just how eerie, confusing, and distressing it is to go to sleep in a way you can’t snap yourself out of, then wake up what feels like seconds later to a completely different world. Almost like waking up from surgery somewhere besides a hospital. But the scariest part isn’t the traumatic shift in environment, no, it’s having to just get up and go to work afterwards.

In the Lift, you play as a backup handyman for some kind of corporate space operation. This company, well, freezes its backup handymen until it needs to call upon their services. The basic insanity of that aside, your first task is to simply show you can do some simple repairs in an elevator, then head over to your pod. Your vision freezes over, then almost in the time it takes to blink, the world changes. Everything seems to have been destroyed around you, and there’s… stuff everywhere. Gnarled, possibly moist, black tendrils penetrate nearly every wall or surface, and there isn’t another human being in sight. And all you can find nearby is a screwdriver and some lightbulbs.

This is a game with two distinct halves. The first half is a handyman simulator, something you’d expect to see pop up on Steam or whatever with a “cozy” tag. Every little task you have is a zero pressure but very involved process, such as having to grab and move a panel aside before you can start tinkering with its parts, needing extras of said parts in your inventory, then arranging everything per some given instructions to make it work good as new again. You’re fixing chairs, light fixtures, electrical devices, and, of course, sometimes incredibly complex machinery.

The second half is a mysterious, dark, sci-fi mystery that combines elements you’ll be familiar with if you’ve seen things like Alien or played games like Prey (the Bethesda one). It’s the usual stuff, but from the perspective of a character who has a screwdriver instead of a gun. As you make your way through the environment, fixing things inevitably helps you figure out what the heck is going on and what you can do to get out of the situation safely. Luckily, fixing things is precisely what you need to do.

The way “levels” are set up is by some particularly silly sci-fi gimmickry, in that the brilliant minds behind this space travel have made “functioning stuff” a kind of energy source in and of itself. So you have a goal that’s basically a “functioning stuff” threshold, and when I hit that metric in my demo I was able to progress in the story. The entire first mission of sorts was to get a massive generator up and running, and along the way I had to get my percentage of overall operation up by making simple repairs alongside the big one. It’s an intriguing system that seems to be an effective way to marry the genre-heavy narrative with the non-combative gameplay.

The second mission was more open, and much more complicated. You get a sort of cosmic horror vacuum cleaner that can suck up mysterious, spooky goop, and a glue device that can patch up walls. But the biggest problem I ran into was coming across many busted devices and not enough pieces to repair them all right away. It seems like in the bigger levels there’s a factor of order of operations and resource management, because you can’t simply repair everything at your leisure. It was a little frustrating to stumble around at first, but since there’s no time limit or actual threat (just vibes), there was no actual pressure to be hypercompetent. It was just me, one weird NPC character, and my progress meter. Lots of scary space goo, too.

The Lift is a fascinating game, largely because it seems to challenge the “cozy” space, not just in taking those gameplay mechanics and putting them in a scary setting, but also because it has a more focused narrative structure compared to the usual sandbox-like style. The preview build was quite early, with only hints of what to expect there, but I definitely walked away intrigued about how it’s all going to come together in the end. Can a game be scary and relaxing at the same time? Is handyman work enough to carry a story like this all the way through? These are questions I’m actively anticipating the answers for, making The Lift an experience I’m eager to dive back into when the time comes.

The Lift is coming to PC sometime in 2026. A preview build was provided by the publisher for this article.