THE SPIRIT LIFT

It's graduation night at Lucid Falls High, and eight teenagers wandering from the after-party stumble onto THE SPIRIT LIFT: a magical hotel elevator that drags them through thirteen floors of monsters toward whatever waits in the penthouse. Built by solo-adjacent studio prettysmart games, it's a roguelike deckbuilder squarely in the Slay the Spire tradition, but its hook is a team system rather than a single protagonist — pick three of eight unlockable teens, each bringing their own starting cards, gear, and relics into a shared deck and a shared health pool. Steam's Very Positive rating reflects a review sample that's fallen hard for the resulting atmosphere and team-building variety, even as a smaller, specific, and consistent set of pacing and balance complaints keeps recurring across both positive and negative reviews alike.

A theme reviewers can't stop talking about

The most repeated praise in the sample isn't about mechanics at all — it's about vibe. Reviewers describe the 90s teen-horror aesthetic, drawn from the same well as Goosebumps and Scooby-Doo, as immediately distinctive within an oversaturated genre, and several specifically call out the game's slowly unfolding lore, delivered through environmental details and character interactions rather than exposition dumps, as a reason to keep returning even after a failed run. The soundtrack draws some of the strongest individual praise in the entire sample, with multiple reviewers calling out specific tracks and at least one buying the soundtrack separately after just a few hours of play.

A genre-standard formula with a genuinely different hook

Mechanically, the core loop will be familiar to anyone who's played a card-battler roguelike: build and refine a deck, manage a run's resources, and fight your way to a boss. What reviewers consistently credit as fresh is the team system — mixing and matching three of eight characters changes not just your starting nine cards but your available relics and card colours, and the sample describes dozens of viable combinations worth exploring. Several reviewers also praise the combat's reflect-and-dodge system as a genuine alternative to the block-based defence common across the genre, giving fights their own texture rather than feeling like a reskinned Slay the Spire.

The elevator problem

If there's one specific design choice the sample agrees on above all else, it's this: the unskippable elevator ride between floors, and the slow dungeon-crawling movement leading up to it, drags. Multiple reviewers — across both recommended and not-recommended reviews — single out the elevator transition specifically as needlessly slow with no option to speed it up, even though the game offers speed settings for walking, turning, and combat elsewhere. One reviewer calls it "excruciating," another says playtimes "could be 1/4 less just by speeding up some animations," and it's a strong enough irritant that it shows up as a complaint even inside otherwise glowing reviews.

A grind some reviewers love and others don't

Progression draws the sample's most divided response. Positive reviewers frequently describe the "just one more run" pull of unlocking new characters, cards, and lore as the game's biggest strength, and the currency-based meta-progression system — which lets players choose their own upgrades rather than leaving them to chance — gets specific praise for feeling fairer than most roguelike progression systems. Critical reviewers describe the same system as glacially paced, citing three or more full runs required to unlock a single new character or upgrade tree, and argue the game would benefit from roughly halving those requirements. A related complaint concerns enemy variety: multiple reviewers on both sides of the recommendation line describe most monsters as reused, palette-swapped versions of a small handful of base types, which several say undercuts the sense of discovery the rest of the game works hard to build.

Value and balance

A detailed critical review argues the roughly thirty-dollar asking price is steep against genre contemporaries offering far more hours for similar or lower cost, and several reviewers separately flag boss and reward balancing as heavily RNG-dependent, with specific complaints about bosses capable of filling a deck with curses or gaining reflect on every hit regardless of player skill. That said, plenty of reviewers who log dozens or well over a hundred hours push back hard on the value complaint specifically, framing the game as a "hidden gem" that rewards sustained investment even if a first few hours undersell it.

Where opinions genuinely split

Not every complaint in the sample is universally shared, and it's worth flagging the disagreements rather than flattening them into consensus. One reviewer argues the first-person dungeon-crawling between encounters is pointless padding that should be replaced with a Slay the Spire-style node map; another, in one of the sample's longest and most considered reviews, argues the opposite — that stripping out the physical sense of exploring the hotel's hallways would remove the exact atmosphere that makes the game feel distinct from its influences in the first place. Difficulty draws a similar split: several reviewers describe early runs as a breezy walk that only gets genuinely hard once RNG turns against them, while others report the game as consistently, sometimes unfairly, punishing from the start. None of this suggests the sample is unreliable — if anything, it points to a game whose systems produce meaningfully different experiences depending on which characters, cards, and bosses a given run hands a player, for better and for worse.

Final Verdict

THE SPIRIT LIFT earns its Very Positive rating on the strength of a genuinely distinctive theme, a soundtrack the sample can't stop praising, and a team-composition system that gives an otherwise familiar deckbuilding loop real replay value. What keeps it from a stronger consensus is a specific, repeated set of pacing complaints — an unskippable elevator ride chief among them — plus a grindy unlock structure and RNG-heavy balance that several reviewers say work against the relaxed, exploratory mood the rest of the game is trying to build. For deckbuilder and roguelike fans drawn to strong theming and character-driven variety over raw mechanical depth, it's an easy recommendation; for players who bounce off slow pacing or luck-dependent difficulty spikes, the free demo is worth trying before committing to the full asking price.