THE SPIRIT LIFT

I came at The Spirit Lift the way I come at any strategy game: looking for the decision tree underneath the aesthetic. What I found was a surprisingly well-constructed roguelite deckbuilder whose thematic design does real mechanical work rather than just dressing up a genre skeleton. The setup is campy horror-movie stuff, graduation night, haunted hotel, teens who should know better, but the card system underneath respects your time and your brain. The core loop runs like this: you pick three characters from a roster of eight, and their combined starting cards form the seed of your run's deck. The four archetype categories (Physical, Spiritual, Tactical, Gifted) map directly to high school cliques, and that is not just flavoring. Tobias the jock front-loads raw damage through his baseball bat and basketball cards; Sako the tennis star leans into dodge stacking as a primary defensive layer; Maria the preppy carries makeup and a pocket mirror that translate into support-oriented effects. Choosing your trio is your build-order decision, and it sets the strategic parameters for the entire run. You then walk the corridors of the procedurally arranged Vexington Hotel floor by floor, opening rooms for cards, gear, gold, and random events, before riding the titular elevator up to repeat the process across 13 floors and a penthouse boss fight. Combat is turn-based, energy-capped at three by default, and leans on status keywords, haunt for damage over time, vulnerability to amplify hits, dodge to negate incoming damage outright, purify to strip debuffs. Many items carry limited charges, which forces you to treat them as single-use resources rather than permanent tools, a small but meaningful pressure on your planning. Meta-progression runs through the Spirit Shop, where Spirit Points earned from each run (win or lose, based on floors explored, combats won, risks taken) buy permanent unlocks. This is the loop that keeps the clock moving. Players report spending 50-plus hours unlocking all starting cards and gear variants across the full character roster, and the community consensus is that it never feels like grinding because the team composition variable stays interesting that long. One Steam reviewer noted chasing optimal character combinations for unlockables as the main driver of continued play, which is exactly the kind of emergent goal structure a well-built meta-progression system should generate. The developers, a husband-and-wife two-person studio, have noted that the game is drawing in deckbuilder newcomers alongside veterans, and the difficulty curve supports that: early floors are forgiving enough that a first clear can come on the third run, but floor 9 onward hits meaningfully harder and starts punishing sloppy resource management. The weaknesses are real and worth naming. The UI has consistency issues, character portraits are detailed while enemy sprites are comparatively flat, and the visual language between the 3D low-poly hotel environment and the 2D card interface does not always cohere. The horror atmosphere is vibes-forward rather than genuinely tense; this is a deckbuilder that wears horror as flavoring rather than a game that will unsettle you. Narrative depth is thin for the non-boss story content, character banter is charming but short, and lore is drip-fed through random events across many runs, which is fine if you like gradual world-building and frustrating if you want answers quickly. Some powerful cards also rely on luck to trigger, which will annoy players who prefer deterministic strategies. None of this tanks the experience, but go in knowing The Spirit Lift is a cozy-creepy card game, not a survival horror experience. For a deckbuilder newcomer this is a confident starting point: short runs (around 30 minutes each), readable card effects, immediate feedback on what went wrong. For a genre veteran the depth lives in team synergy optimization, charge-limited resource planning, and hunting the later unlocks. The game launched to a Very Positive rating on Steam and has clearly found its audience. Small studio, clean execution, genuine replay value.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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