Hello Keepers,
Ivan here - Studio Director of Fantastic Signals.
In our first playtest dev diary, we shared the results of the September 2025 test and talked about what they meant for the future of THE LIFT.
Since then, we have reworked the Post Office (the floor shown in the demo), updated the inventory system, expanded the progress tracking system, and added new items, quests, secrets, environmental stories, and an entirely new collection of things to repair.
In June, we invited you into a larger (and considerably less polished) alpha build to find out how all of these systems worked together over several hours.
The results are in. This means it is time for the triumphant return of something truly exciting:
One of the main things we wanted to check was whether our changes made a positive impact on experience, and it looks like they did!
The new build was larger and rougher, with more interconnected systems. Even so, 53% of respondents spent at least three hours playing, while 76% reached the end of the available content.
Most importantly for a game about maintenance, 91% repaired everything or almost everything they could find.
This time, we asked you to rate every specific repair in the game to see what sticks and what bounces off. Surprisingly, there were literally 0 repairs/devices that were actively disliked by the community, but some were rated much higher than the rest!
Commutator was one of the most highly praised interactions in the build!
The response was both encouraging and extremely useful. The foundation of THE LIFT is working, but the test also showed us much more clearly where meaningful complexity can turn into friction.
Many of the most highly rated gameplay beats were not necessarily the largest or longest. They combined three things:
A device the player needed to understand.
A satisfying physical interaction.
A visible consequence or discovery.
So, continuing the analogies with children’s toys — a good device and it’s repair should be a bit like a “Kinder Surprise” egg (known as Kinder Joy in US). You slowly unwrap multiple layers of interactions, “working” your way towards getting the reward of a working device.
The first playtest helped us confirm THE LIFT's core fantasy. The latest test gave us something more specific: a map showing where that fantasy is at its strongest and where are its weak points.
The central finding can be summarised in four words:
In the first playtest, we identified balance, resources, and the creation of a satisfying flow state as major development topics. The latest test gave us a remarkably clear answer.
Judging by these results, we came to two conclusions:
You want more engaging devices to fiddle with, and you're generally not afraid of the occasional challenge that comes with them.
The resource management is more or less fine as it is. We can make it a little more relaxed and less demanding, but making it even more demanding doesn't seem like the right direction.
And we completely agree! We want the game to be about the satisfaction of deciding what to repair and how to repair it, not about repetitive resource grinding. Resources should be part of the gameplay in the same way as the devices themselves: obtaining them should feel like an interesting piece of a repair challenge, not a necessary filler chore.
In the coming months, we'll be testing further parts of the game to make sure that we keep the balance firmly in the “3” zone.
Inventory was one of the systems we changed substantially after the previous playtest, since many of you had trouble with it.
We doubled down on the contextual inventory and improved the look and feel of the full-screen inventory.
While the full-screen inventory still has some issues, especially when there are too many different items in a single category, we want to make it mostly obsolete by making contextual item suggestions even more robust and by adding a compact version of the inventory that you can use on the fly without opening the full-screen UI.
The point is, we believe players should be looking at the device they're repairing and the world around them, not at the UI.
Less time finding the part. More time doing the repairs!
We've always had a system for placing items on the grid, but this time we intentionally created a number of gameplay moments that invited you to actually clean up and put things back where they belong. Or... maybe somewhere else!
In the end, it was up to you to decide how to declutter and decorate the area.
And it looks like more than half of players liked it!
For those who didn't enjoy it as much, the good news is that it's completely optional. We considered adding some kind of reward for interacting with clutter, but that would mean there's a "correct" way to handle it, making the activity feel somewhat mandatory (at least if you wanted to collect all the rewards).
So we decided to leave it as something players can choose to engage with, rather than cluttering the restoration task list with more required actions than necessary.
Our narrative dev diary described a story that players could uncover through side content, conversations, and their own curiosity.
The latest playtest strongly supported that direction — we've added some optional narrative beats, but not as many as we'd hoped, and you seem to agree!
You asked for more traces of life, small scenes, documents, secrets, and side stories.
We also found moments where characters didn't respond convincingly to major discoveries — particularly reports about other inhabitants of the station. The mystery itself wasn't the problem. The problem was that the Keeper's reports sometimes seemed to be dismissed without serious consideration.
Characters don't need to know the answer. But they should acknowledge what the player has discovered.
What the sensors say and what the Keeper sees may not always be the same thing.
Our next narrative pass will focus on more environmental storytelling, more meaningful documents, and additional lore and story beats that you can discover at your own pace, with much less reliance on exposition from characters.
Thank you to everyone who joined the playtest, recorded their sessions, and completed our surveys. You helped us confirm how far THE LIFT has come since September, and gave us a much clearer picture of where it needs to go next.
We're hard at work on the main game content right now. While the overall vision is more or less set and we already know what kind of game we want to make, this playtest is helping us shape the experience into the best version it can be.
We're planning to run more small-scale tests later this year before finally releasing a public demo next year. So if you'd like to take part, join our Discord community and stay tuned for future announcements!
Until then, keep the lights on!
Ivan,
Studio Director, Fantastic Signals