The Spirit Lift Review

The Spirit Lift is set in a haunted hotel in the 1990s and follows a group of newly graduated teens as they attempt to make their way to the top. Packaged in a high-school thriller casing, it combines dungeon-crawling mechanics (similar to titles like Etrian Odyssey) with roguelite deckbuilding trappings, delivering an interesting take on the deckbuilding genre, as the dungeon-crawling aspects necessitate a shift in your typical approach. 

To start, the player chooses 3 teens to take into the party. The base number of available characters is 3, but more are unlocked as you play. Each character has their own starting cards and gear that gives each of them a unique playstyle and identity, often reinforcing the type of person they are. The jock, Tobias, has cards for a baseball bat and a basketball, for instance. After choosing your team, you’ll make your way into the manor proper.

Developer: prettysmart games

Publisher: prettysmartgames

Platform: Played PC

Availability: Released January 27, 2026 on PC (Steam).

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As you explore each of the 13 hotel floors, you may find yourself fighting enemies to earn gold coins and cards, upgrading cards upon leveling up, or taking part in randomized events. The events are a particular delight, as they often contain the game’s most interesting decisions. Do you risk some health for a chance to gain experience? Perhaps you’d rather search for evidence that provides some interesting narrative information over obtaining some gold. Beyond the choice dynamic, the events offer a glimpse into the oddities of the hotel. Why is there a bathtub of acid? Where did all of these party favors come from? Who is that wolf guy? There’s always something new to encounter on every floor.

In many roguelite deckbuilders, such as Slay the Spire or GWENT: Rogue Mage, your navigation decisions are typically based upon an assessment of what the chosen path looks like; what enemies are there, whether there are any shops, and so on. While your primary decision-making relies on risk vs. reward calculations, you can devise a plan and choose an optimized route for what you intend to do. 

Risk assessment is similarly important here in The Spirit Lift, but without a clear choice in pathways or enemy selection, it becomes more vital to do those calculations on the fly. You can’t really plan for specific encounters, events, or rewards before finding your elevator up to the next floor — you simply deal with the trials as they come to you. Thankfully, the options available to the player are plentiful.

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Cards are your method of engaging in combat and represent mundane items that the characters have on hand. These cards are broken down into four types: Weapons, Tools, Aid, and Trauma. Weapons are your standard attacks, doing direct damage to an enemy. Tools provide passive bonuses that last throughout a fight, such as lowering the cost of specific card types or giving enemies a debuff when certain actions are performed. Aid cards are the most versatile type of all, having the ability to heal or add buffs to the player, inflict the enemy with various status effects, or even draw additional cards. Finally, Trauma cards are special cards that harm the player in some way when the card’s conditions are met. Some may have adverse effects when drawn, or even confer bonuses to enemies when left in your hand unplayed. These trauma cards are also unique in that they can’t be removed in the shop — they must be played a requisite number of times before disappearing.

Gear pieces are an additional boon for the player, offering permanent boons without the use of cards. Each starting character has a gear piece tied to them, and you can only hold 8 pieces of gear at a time during a run — at least until you upgrade this through the spirit shop. I have found gear to be the single most important element of success in each run. Getting powerful pieces of gear and then planning your deck around that is absurdly more powerful than the inverse, and getting that extra gear slot (or more) from the spirit shop makes things even easier.

However, the spirit shop is more than just a place to increase relic capacity. Available only from the main menu, it serves as the metaprogression hub, a place to spend earned “Spirit Points” to upgrade the baseline health, gold, gear, etc. of your starting party. These upgrades are completely linear. Spending points can only improve your chances of victory, as there are no drawbacks to any choice that I have unlocked.

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When you reach the end of a run, you’ll face one of four random bosses. When you defeat the boss, it becomes available within a pool of boss options for manual selection at the start of each run. This is nice if you’d like to fight a specific enemy for any reason, but doing so negates the chance of encountering a new boss that you could have faced. Winning this final fight also ends the run and grants the player some spirit points based on their performance.

Scouring the hotel halls for clues about the ongoing events, your characters will also sometimes speak to each other. These exchanges are quite short, but do offer some insight into the interpersonal dynamics or personality quirks of each teen. However, each character is strictly one-note, and those interactions are limited in number, offering very little insight into the overarching narrative or the characters’ interpretation of ongoing events. Really, there’s a dearth of narrative elements overall, but the game is still largely buoyed by its excellent card battles, regardless.

There are even a few benefits to choosing the same character across multiple runs. First, you’ll unlock alternative starting cards and gear to choose from, and second, you may come across events that grant “keys” to a character’s story, opening up a little more of their world for you to see.

Nearly everything about The Spirit Lift is perfectly competent, with the exception of one nagging element: the UI.

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The UI itself during this navigation is certainly functional, but does not feel particularly cohesive. The experience meter is reminiscent of gauges you’d see on a car, such as for a gas meter or odometer, and the party menu includes simple portraits that show audio levels (like you’d see on a car radio or other audio device) when characters speak. However, the other on-screen elements don’t in any way evoke a similar car aesthetic. Gear is depicted in small, black and white images housed within tiny, square boxes and little else; information, such as the number of cards in your deck or your available funds, is communicated through numbers stationed next to simplistic-but-fully-colored iconography — neither of which shows a connection to the meters in the other elements of the UI, or to each other. 

Inspecting the UI outside of navigation leads to a bit more confusion, as well. Menus have many recognizable elements, such as your run history records being shown through a CRT screen, scanlines and all, or fast forward and rewind buttons replacing elements normally reserved for “confirm” and “back” or equivalent selections, but fail to coalesce into something resembling a whole. 

Taken individually, many visual elements of The Spirit Lift are interesting. The color palette heavily features striking hues of green, red, and purple that make objects, rooms, and enemies pop when they are meant to be the focus; the dark, cramped corridors lend themselves to an eerie atmosphere, and so on. But the lack of consistency and cohesiveness between these elements leads to a confused image on screen. The character portraits are quite detailed, but enemy sprites are flat (dimensionally and aesthetically), and objects in the environment are three-dimensional, low-poly items. I struggle to wrap my head around the design decisions that lead to this artistic muddying, but it is ultimately a minor gripe.

...there’s a dearth of narrative elements overall, but the game is still largely buoyed by its excellent card battles, regardless.

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That said, The Spirit Lift has some significant bright spots. Having a large cast of playable characters leaves room for experimentation and strategizing in how you build out your deck and approach each fight. Leaning into each teen’s strengths is key to success, so forcing one particular card type or strategy is not advised in every situation. Each run is also quite short, with any excursion taking no longer than half an hour to fully complete.

In terms of difficulty, this is probably on the lighter side of games within its genre. After six full runs through, I have yet to die a single time. I’ve never been close, really. I wonder how much of my success is owed to having played a large number of roguelite deckbuilders in the past, or just what the intended difficulty is meant to be, but the large number of upgrades and abundant gear choices in every ascent attempt never leave me wanting for power.

Verdict

Overall, I am quite fond of The Spirit Lift. Its mix of horror elements, deckbuilding, and dungeon-crawling is immediately enticing, and the card battles are fun, albeit a bit safe. While I do have some issues with the UI and would prefer more difficulty options, the game is a solid recommendation for roguelite deckbuilder enjoyers, especially if they’re looking for a more casual offering.

Image Credits: prettysmart games

Disclosure: We received a free review copy of this product from the publisher.