LIFTED

A time heist with real chemistry

LIFTED casts players as Ari, an easygoing slacker who becomes the reluctant wingman to his professor's manic, love-fuelled scheme to steal back a piece of stolen history by travelling through time. The premise is pure '80s-blockbuster pastiche — Egypt, a pirate hideout modelled on Blackbeard's lair, and a Mexican jungle level all serve as backdrops for a puzzle-platforming romp that mixes climbing, swinging, and scripted chase sequences with light environmental puzzles. Reviewers reach for the same handful of comparisons with striking consistency: Back to the Future for the buddy-comedy warmth between Ari and his professor, Indiana Jones for the pulpy tomb-raiding stakes, and Rayman for the acrobatic platforming feel. What comes through in nearly every review is that the chemistry between the two leads is the game's actual selling point — the writing, comedic timing, and voice performances for Ari and the professor draw specific, repeated praise, with more than one reviewer noting the delight of realizing former Disney talent worked on the project and it shows in how confidently the tone is held together.

That confidence extends to the game's technical presentation. For a debut release — several reviewers explicitly flag that this is Adventure Works L.L.C.'s first game — LIFTED is described as carrying a level of polish usually associated with much bigger studios: sleek menus, smooth transitions between gameplay and cutscene, and tightly tuned controls and animation. The soundtrack in particular draws an outsized share of the praise, with multiple reviewers independently wishing for a standalone release and describing the score as playing almost continuously, swelling at the right emotional beats without becoming intrusive. None of this depth is wasted on a difficulty spike, either — dedicated easy modes for both puzzles and platforming keep the game approachable for families and less experienced players, while scripted chase sequences and a handful of precision-jump gauntlets give more experienced players real moments of tension to look forward to.

The one asking-price problem everyone agrees on

If there's a single note that recurs across nearly every review, positive or negative, it's runtime. Most players report finishing LIFTED's story in two-and-a-half to four hours, occasionally stretching past five with a full collectible hunt, and at the roughly NZ$29 asking price, multiple reviewers do the maths out loud and land on the same conclusion: it's a great game that's genuinely short for the money, even if most of them still recommend buying in at full price for the experience alone. More than one comparison to the cost of a movie ticket comes up as a way of justifying the spend, and the game's own demo — which several reviewers credit directly with helping them decide to buy — is repeatedly recommended as the smartest way for price-sensitive players to gauge fit before committing. It's worth noting this isn't a complaint about content quality; it's specifically about value density, and reviewers who weren't bothered by the length were often the ones who'd caught the game on sale or treated the short runtime as a feature rather than a bug in a genre often bloated with padding.

The corpus's small handful of critical reviews sharpen that same point and add one more concrete issue. One detailed negative review describes a reproducible, game-breaking bug early in the Mexico/Yucatan level that repeatedly killed their character on a scripted board-crossing sequence regardless of what input they gave; the developer responded directly in the review thread with several troubleshooting suggestions — releasing movement input at a specific moment, disconnecting a controller in case of stick drift — while noting they hadn't been able to reproduce the issue internally. That kind of direct, detailed developer engagement is a good sign for post-launch support, but it's also a genuine risk worth flagging for anyone who hits the same wall. A second negative review is more straightforward: the game is simply too short for its price, with a side note that Ukrainian localisation is absent. And even among positive reviews, more than one player notes that moving through a level too quickly can cut off a line of dialogue mid-sentence, a minor but avoidable rough edge in a game that leans so heavily on the strength of its writing to land its best moments.

What the achievement data shows

Steam's global achievement percentages tell a story consistent with a short, mostly-linear narrative game rather than an open system built for replay. The core story-completion achievement sits at 37.5% of the total playerbase, with the earliest story-progress milestones sitting far higher, in the 60-96% range, reflecting the drop-off typical of a story game where a meaningful slice of owners never finish. Optional side content, on the other hand, is barely touched: individual collectible pickups sit mostly in the 5-10% range, unlockable cosmetic skins hover around 3-11%, and the achievement for gathering every collectible in the game sits at just 4.7%. That distribution matches the reviews closely — a game whose core three-hour story is what nearly everyone signs up for and finishes, with its replay-driven collectible hunt remaining a niche pursuit for a smaller, more dedicated slice of the audience.

Final verdict

LIFTED is a confident, warmly written debut that earns its "Very Positive" reception through genuine strength of character writing, voice performance, and a soundtrack reviewers can't stop bringing up unprompted. Its Back to the Future-and-Indiana-Jones pastiche never feels like empty nostalgia because the relationship between Ari and his professor is written and performed with real care, and the approachable-but-not-trivial platforming and puzzle design make it a genuine option for players of varying skill levels, including families playing together. The recurring asking-price-versus-runtime complaint is fair and worth taking seriously before buying at full price, and the reported early-level bug is a real risk worth a quick check of recent Steam discussions before committing, but neither undercuts what is, by wide consensus, one of the more purely charming story-driven platformers of the year.