You know when you follow someone into the elevator and when they turn around to face the doors, you choose to stand still and instead meet their eyes? No, of course you don’t. Everyone knows that when you’re in a lift you don’t under any circumstances face other people in the lift unless you know them and you’re already in a conversation. Just yesterday I got into the lift with someone I sit one desk over from in the office. I dutifully looked at my phone the entire time until we were safely out of the building. Well, in the puzzle game How To Ride Elevators Like A Human you play a helpful alien who saves people who have accidentally ended up in the dreadful situation of facing one another.
Each short puzzle takes place in a compact lift where one (or several) humans are starting at each other. Using your small UFO’s tractor beam, you must pick up and relocate the passengers until no one is making eyes at anyone else. You may well recognise this as a sokoban-style puzzle game, but, despite retreading familiar ground, I’m a big fan of this extraterrestrial framing. Even if I have an ulterior motive for sharing this game…
But I’ll come back to that in a minute.
Puzzles quickly become more complicated with elevators holding increasingly more passengers, spaces in the lift being taken up by immovable heavy luggage bags, and short children introducing a challenge of two levels of eyelines. (Adults can see over them, but they can look up at adults. It’s best to make them stare at some luggage.)
How To Ride Elevators Like A Human is a little janky and it shouldn’t take you long to race through the ten levels in its Steam demo, but I’ll admit, the main reason I’m writing about How To Ride Elevators Like A Human is because of a cruel joke I made in our work chat this morning.
Mark had shared the Forbes profile of Asha Sharma, which included the line “Unafraid to create tensions, the jacket- and sneaker-loving executive has come in clear-eyed and with swagger, indirectly questioning her predecessor’s strategy, and has shown a remarkable knack for marketing that plan with deftly written employee memos, new slogans, and strategic posts on social media, where meme after meme of Sharma also appear.” (This is in addition to the detail she’s planning three more waves of layoffs between now and January.) I said “People who are ‘Unafraid to create tensions’ are the sorts of people who get into an elevator last and don’t turn to face the doors. They meet eyes with everyone they can, like the monsters they are.”
So, when by chance I stumbled across a puzzle game that was essentially an Asha Sharma simulator I had to share it.
You know what the next worst thing is that someone “unafraid to create tensions” can do? Stand one step behind you on the escalator, instead of the statutory two. You’re standing too close to me, Sharma, back up.
