A free visual novel about being stuck in a lift

Lift Your Spirits is a creepy visual novel about a woman stuck in a lift while alone at college. Using text and still images, the game allows you to pick between four endings depending on your in-game responses. The game has you decide if the story is about ghosts, spirits, or something else.

This free visual novel game has graphics similar to John Doe in approach and storytelling. It is a self-contained scary story but doesn’t have the storytelling complexity of games like Doki Doki Literature Club.

A scary indie story

You can pay a donation for this scary game when you download it. You can play the text at a faster rate, but some come with musical cues that may be missed if you speed things up. It takes around twenty minutes to play and doesn’t really try to jumpscare the user, except with one ending where it gets a little loud.

A nice visual style

The solo indie developer clearly made an intentional design choice by having the main character look like a mixture of anime and 1980s Disney cute. The game isn’t predictable enough to tell you the whole scenario was a dream, but some plot points are pretty heavily telegraphed if you have ever seen other ghost horror visual novels or movies.

Short and well contained

Like most good horror stories, the protagonist is isolated without any reason or means of escape. Though this could have become a drawn-out sequence, the writer keeps the story moving at a brisk pace. The plot direction also seems pretty organic within the context of the game.

A nice indie-horror effort

The writing in this creepy visual novel both saves and damages the overall experience. The writing is tight, pretty concise, and doesn’t deviate too far into the unnecessary. However, there are cliche comments and phrases that may have sounded edgy a few years ago but now seem overused, labored, and unnecessary.