The Spirit Lift Review — Hotel Hell

Roguelike deckbuilding titles have exploded in popularity recently, to the point where it feels like I’m reviewing a new one at least every other week. I believe this is due in no small part to just how accessible resources for this genre have gotten for developers and how easy they’ve become to make; there are so many YouTube tutorials and premade game templates for the genre on the market right now that even I’ve thought about making one.

Make no mistake, this is not a criticism or complaint; I personally love the genre, and I’m enjoying all of the creative twists on the familiar formula indie game makers have been releasing lately. Somewhat like the Metroidvania title, creators in this genre are using the formula to make visually and narratively interesting games using familiar mechanics, though I often find new titles in this genre play with the formula a bit more than the aforementioned Metroidvanias.

The Spirit Lift is one such deckbuilding roguelike that caught my attention recently. This title uses campy, teen-team horror as its thematic approach, putting players in the shoes of a rag-tag group of teenage friends as they discover and ride the titular spirit lift, a haunted elevator that takes them through long-forgotten and haunted hotel floors.

The game has your selected group of teenagers explore the lift one floor at a time and encounter procedurally generated rooms full of enemies and loot before eventually facing a boss on the 13th floor. Mechanically speaking, The Spirit Lift doesn’t do a whole lot to reinvent the genre, instead focusing on creating a lot of deck variety through its playable characters, who all bring with them a deck with its own archetype and strengths. You bring a party of three teens with you at the start of each run, creating a ton of different possibilities for your starting deck.

This itself is a pretty unique spin on the deckbuilding side of deckbuilding roguelike mechanics, and I think it really works. When you pair this with the myriad of unlockable cards and trinkets during a run, you can create some really fun-to-play decks that feel substantial to use without necessarily feeling broken or OP. I did, however, have some problems with how the game chooses to allow players to unlock these characters.

The Spirit Lift locks new characters not behind how far you get in a run, but behind how many runs you do. I’m personally not a fan of this kind of progression in roguelike games; it rewards repetition rather than actual progress, giving players one of the most highly sought-after rewards (in new playable characters) by volume of attempts rather than how well they actually do. I think this sort of undermines how successful you feel after each run, too, not to mention the mystery of how to unlock each character is spoiled in the pre-run menu when it tells you to simply attempt a certain number of games.

In theory, this system is supposed to match up with how the game is played; rather than one long run, The Spirit Lift has players play multiple 13-level runs, each one with a randomly selected boss fight at the end. Ignoring the fact that character unlocking is exploitable, a.k.a., you can just abandon your runs immediately until you unlock all of the characters, I still would have preferred character unlocks being tied to achievements done during a run rather than just how many runs you’ve started.

Another gripe I have with the game concerns the monster designs. While there are some really unique creatures to encounter in the game, I found that enemy variety was severely lacking, with the same two or three foes showing up over and over again throughout your runs, and the only variation between them being recolors. On a more subjective note, the game leans far more into a campy, cartoony aesthetic for its monsters, using a lot of camp in their designs without leaning into the horror too hard. While this aesthetic will certainly work for some, I think that it would work better if the character sprites for enemies were a bit more animated; as they are now, something about them felt kind of off for me personally.

Overall, The Spirit Lift isn’t a bad entry into the genre at all. Its twist on the deckbuilding side of mechanics works really well, and the card combos you can set up over the course of a run are pretty fun to play. The teen-team horror vibe, à la Stranger Things and Scooby-Doo, works really well, though I feel as though the art could have done more to capture the aesthetic the game was going for. Where the game falters a bit is in progression and enemy variety—two issues that go hand-in-hand as unlocking new characters becomes something of a chore of repetition rather than a meaningful reward—and the game is given rather limited replayability if only because you’re put up against the same creatures over and over again without too much variation in the final bosses, either.

The Spirit Lift is a game I think I would have liked to see in Early Access. As much as the game has to offer, I think its cast of creatures could be greatly expanded, its progression reworked a bit, and its replayability expanded with some new, meaningful additions. That being said, you absolutely would not go wrong picking the game up, because it still has plenty to offer, even if it might leave you wanting a bit more.

Try Hard Guides was provided a Steam code for this PC review of The Spirit Lift. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! The Spirit Lift is available on Steam.