LIFTED – A Brilliant Debut That Blends 5 Adventure Films Into One Game

You play Ari, a slacker student who signs up for a bit of extra credit and ends up doing all the legwork for his physics professor’s plan to travel through time and woo the history teacher. Your getaway vehicle is an elevator where the floor numbers are years. Your most reliable teammate is a chinchilla named Julius, who is comfortably the smartest one in the group.

Lifted, from Adventure Works, is what you get when someone takes Indiana Jones, Back to the Future, The Mummy, Tomb Raider, and Pirates of the Caribbean, drops in a classic platformer or two for texture, and hits blend. On paper that’s a dog’s dinner. It isn’t. I had a properly good time with it. So, gripes and all, here we go.

Lifted is the first game from Adventure Works, the studio of former Disney Imagineer Jeffrey Ashbrook, whose old day job included building theme-park rides like the Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run. It was years in the making. You can feel that ride-designer background all over this thing, which is at its best when it’s staging a big setpiece.

I asked Ashbrook where the idea came from, and the answer is better than anything I’d have guessed. He was in Egypt with National Geographic when an archaeologist named Bill Saturno gave a presentation on Giovanni Belzoni, the Italian circus strongman turned tomb raider whose name the group kept finding carved into the walls of temples and tombs. The more Ashbrook read about him, the more the game assembled itself in his head: as he puts it, “two, kind of lovable idiots, travel back in time to rob the greatest tomb raider who ever lived. Kind of underdogs in over their heads”.

Here’s the part that made me laugh. Saturno isn’t an Egyptologist. He’s a Maya specialist, the man who crawled into a looters’ trench in the Guatemalan jungle in 2001 and found the oldest intact Maya murals anyone has ever seen. So Egypt handed Ashbrook his villain, and the guy giving the slideshow handed him a jungle. Both are in the game. Nobody said those two things are connected. I find it very hard to believe they aren’t.

TL;DR

Lifted is a puzzle-platformer that wears every one of its influences on its sleeve and still somehow feels like its own thing. The art is gorgeous, and the setpieces are a blast. The checkpoint system turns dying into part of the fun instead of a punishment. The story is simple, and the ride is charming enough that it doesn’t matter. I finished it wanting a sequel, which the ending seems more than happy to tease.

Story: A Thin Plot With A Big Heart

The story is the simplest thing about Lifted, and I believe it’s by design. Professor Raventhorpe wants to impress the history teacher, so he builds a time machine (as you do), and Ari gets dragged along to do the actual labour while the professor supplies what the game charmingly calls the “vision”. That’s the whole engine. There are rival treasure hunters to outrun and the Tiara of Nefertari to chase. Simple, but very effective.

That simplicity works because the characters carry it. Ari is a likeable, put-upon everyman who just wants to go home. Julius the chinchilla is my favourite thing in the whole game, and a lot of that is down to one decision: he never speaks. He communicates entirely in squeaks and chirps you can’t parse, and everyone around him carries on as though he’s making perfect sense. It’s a clever bit of restraint.

Now, the way I see it, a likeable protagonist is good, but a likeable villain is gold, and Lifted gets that. When the people trying to ruin your day are fun to be around, a predictable plot stays worth following anyway.

Especially when the people trying to ruin your day were real. Belzoni existed, and so did the two chasing you alongside him. Sarah Banne married him in 1813 and went with him to Egypt in 1815, where she spent long stretches on her own while he was off hauling statues around, documenting the lives of the women she met and eventually publishing her own account of it. James Curtin was the young Irishman the couple hired as a servant back in 1812, and he made the trip too. Ashbrook confirmed to me that both are in the game deliberately. These weren’t invented bad guys. They were historical figures, doing a rougher version of what the game has them doing.

The choice of setting is just as pointed. Belzoni’s great claim to fame was breaking into the tomb of Seti I in the Valley of the Kings in October 1817, a find so completely his that people still call it Belzoni’s Tomb two centuries later. Lifted sends you into it. You are unknowingly robbing the man in the one place his name is carved deepest. Oh, the irony!

One small joy for the name nerds. The hero is called Ari Buktu. Say it out loud. Timbuktu. I don’t know why that delighted me as much as it did, but I just love it.

Gameplay: Die, Learn, Nail It

Strip Lifted down, and it’s a 2.5D puzzle-platformer in the lineage of Prince of Persia Classic and the Assassin’s Creed Chronicles games. You swing, you climb, you hook onto things and pull yourself around, and the physics behind it feels solid and deliberate rather than floaty. The puzzles are logical too. I got a deep sense of satisfaction after solving each one of them.

Worth knowing going in: you don’t get to wander. Lifted keeps you on a set path, and the camera travels with you, swinging around to reframe each moment. That’s the ride designer showing up again. An attraction decides what you’re looking at and when, and this does the same, which is why the big setpieces land so cleanly and why I never once got lost. So if what you want is to prise open a map on your own terms, that isn’t on offer here. There are, however, some places where you need to look around to find collectables. You’ll do those in your second or third play-through, trust me.

The elevator is a clever idea. The floor numbers in Raventhorpe’s “Anytime Elevator” are years. It’s easy to think of the Anytime Elevator as the DeLorean from Back To The Future, but it’s actually more akin to the TARDIS from Doctor Who. Time and space.

The Anytime Elevator moves you through time and space at once, which is a Doctor Who trick, and it’s why the game can drop you in Tortuga in 1712 and the Yucatán a scene later without ever explaining itself. You never actually operate it, though. Every jump happens in a cutscene, which means the sharpest idea in the game’s premise is something you watch rather than something you do. There’s a moment where Ari asks why they can’t just land closer to where they need to be, and the professor bats the question away with a joke. That’s about as hard as Lifted ever interrogates its own rules, and for something this light on its feet, that’s the right call.

The eras are all pretty different. Egypt has a minecart chase that is pure Indiana Jones by way of Tomb Raider. Tortuga drops you into pirate country with Blackbeard and his fellow pirates chasing you. You need to lean on hook-and-grab mechanics the game builds some of its best traversal around. There’s a Maya jungle stretch out in the Yucatán, a snowy mountain, and later a return trip to Egypt that ends with Ari reaching for the tiara in a way that made my heart flutter.

The thing I want to praise loudest is the checkpointing. You will die in this game. A lot. Normally that’s where I start grinding my teeth, but Lifted saves your progress so smartly that repeating a chunk never once felt like a chore. Every death dropped me right back at the lip of the part I’d fumbled, and instead of groaning I’d think, “good, now I know what’s coming, and this time I’m going to nail it”. That is a hard feeling to engineer, and they pulled it off. The collectables are worth a shout too, since hunting them is actually fun and a fair few are clever little puzzles on their own.

The finale chase is the best thing in the game. Everything the game has taught you comes back at once; the amazing camera work adds to the thrill.

Visuals & Animation: Gorgeous, With One Personal Asterisk

The art is beautiful. Every era gets its own palette and its own personality, and the whole thing has the warm, storybook look of an old adventure film. I’d happily hang half these backgrounds on a wall.

My one hangup is entirely personal. The character designs give the cast no real arms or legs, and I could never quite settle into it. It just wasn’t my thing, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t quietly nag at me every time someone reached for an artefact with a hand that technically wasn’t there.

Sound & Voice Acting: It Knows Exactly What Film It’s In

The soundtrack basically never stops, and it took me a while to work out that this is the point. Lifted is doing an 80s adventure film, and those films score everything. Wall-to-wall brass, a theme for every location, music telling you how to feel about a rope swing. Sit it next to the game’s fixed camera and its on-rails route, and it all lines up: this is a score written for something you’re being carried through, not something you’re wandering around in.

Then the finale arrives, and it pays off completely. All that swagger the game has been building turns out to have been heading somewhere, and the music does as much as the platforming to make that sequence the best thing in here. I noticed the score properly for the first time while I was in the middle of it, fantastic.

The voice acting fits the same brief. Joe Gaudet plays Ari with the exact register of a teenager who did not agree to any of this, and Ray O’Hare’s professor is all enthusiasm and no self-awareness. Neither is chasing prestige-drama nuance, and neither should be. They’re playing broad, warm, cartoon-adjacent adventure leads, and they hit that squarely.

Best of the lot is Evan Widjaja, who plays Julius entirely in squeaks and still manages a full performance. Not having to say any actual words is presumably an advantage. He earns it anyway.

Conclusion: Should You Take The Elevator?

Lifted isn’t trying to reinvent anything, and it knows exactly what it is instead. The story is simple, and that never cost me a thing. The art is lovely, the puzzles are fair, and the checkpoint system quietly turns the game’s biggest potential frustration into one of its best qualities.

Mostly, it’s just a great hang. It’s funny, and it’s got heart. And it clearly adores every adventure it’s cribbing from. By the time the credits rolled, I wanted more.

So I asked about that too. Ashbrook told me the game “definitely sets up very well for a sequel”, then added, straight away and unprompted, that he can’t confirm there will be one. Fair enough. Nothing is promised, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

The studio signs off by hoping you “leave it feeling lifted”. As eye-rolling as that is on paper, it got me. I got up from the keyboard lighter than I sat down. I was lifted.

Give me Lifted 2. I’m already back in the elevator.

Thank you, Adventure Works, for sending us the game key for Lifted.

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