Mr. Elevator is a proper hidden gem, with only 25 reviews on Steam currently! I found it during the Steam Next Fest of June 2024. (At that same event, I also found CATO, and Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo.)

What caught my attention about Mr. Elevator is its very distinct art style, featuring only flat bright colours, no shading, jagged lines, and chunky pixels. It has this minimal charm of something like Microsoft Paint.

I want to get on Mr. Elevator’s wild ride

Mr. Elevator is a surreal first-person puzzle game featuring a talking elevator as your companion.

See, in Portal, riding elevators is just a formality; you only get in them because there’s nowhere else to go. In Mr. Elevator, your character has a motivation to seek out this elevator specifically.

You meet and interact with Mr. Elevator, who is some kind of spirit (???) that merged with the elevator. He seems friendly and is open to talking about what worries you.

Looking at his control panel, there’s only a down button on it. Once you press it, he’ll take you to some strange places to solve some puzzles there, as he helps you explore your desires.

In fact, you’re not the only one looking for this elevator! After you finish that initial chapter, each of the next chapters has you playing as a different character. You’ll play as a paranormal investigator seeking to study this elevator, or a young inventor following someone into the elevator, among others.

I have special hands

Every first-person puzzle game needs a signature central game mechanic. In Mr. Elevator, it’s that you can control your two hands separately. (Shoutout to Trespasser!) You need to use your hands to grab stuff, push buttons, knock on doors, and fiddle with gadgets. In fact, if you play on a controller, your hands split the controller into two sides: right/left trigger to hold up that hand, the corresponding stick to move it, and D-pad or face keys for actions! Holding stuff in your hands also acts as this game’s inventory system.

Each chapter focuses on a unique sequence of puzzles based on some theme, like recording and studying cryptids, or decoding alien languages. Of course, you might have to hold a note or tool in one hand while using the other to interact with the environment.

Up and down with puzzles

Sometimes, I found the puzzles to be too cryptic to figure out. They can get into a bit of moon logic, and so I sometimes spent more effort on detecting the designer’s thought process than trying to solve the puzzle in front of me.

The game does have an official online guide with hints and solutions. However, it’s in Japanese only, so you need to translate it if you don’t know Japanese. When I looked at the guide for help, this pattern often emerged:

• I reveal the first several clues, and I see that I’ve already figured out those bits
• I reveal one of the last few clues and it has a surprising logic leap to arrive at a solution
• I wonder, “how was I supposed to know to do that?”

Some Steam reviews mention that this difficulty could be a translation issue. This game is by a small team from Japan, after all.

On a positive note, the puzzles at their best were actually really cool. The puzzles I like best rewarded paying close attention to what was happening in the game. With the game’s graphics and environment being so plain, there isn’t any confusion about what’s important and what’s just environmental detail. In fact, some of the deepest puzzles actually got me to grab some paper and take notes to figure them out!

Last stop

Despite my annoyances with some of Mr. Elevator’s mysterious puzzles, I consider this game to be the ideal example of what I hope to find in a Steam Next Fest. The “indie darlings” already get plenty of attention. Weird, experimental, niche hidden gems drifting in the indie game sea: that’s what I want to celebrate.

Pictured here: me searching for the obscure indie games.