Elevator

📍 Redmond, WA (US)

🏷️ Video Games

Elevator is an absurdist, comedy-horror multiplayer game. Every time you play, you’re in for a different ride. What floor will you stop on? Will you escape? Do you want to? The Elevator decides your fate.

The demo is playable with up to 8 Steam friends, and contains 18 randomized playable floors, a preview of the entrance Lobby and Penthouse (the final floor each run), unlockables, NPCs, and a realistic elevator simulation.

• Discord
• Bluesky
• Steam

About Elevator

Elevator is a re-imagining and sequel to: Elevator: Source. The original mod was created in Garry’s Mod in 2013 as a fun holiday game jam spawned from a very profound thought: 

Could we make a silly game where we trap players inside of an elevator?

What arose was pure, goofy chaos that charmed players around the world. Elevator: Source took players on a wild ride to view different strange, disturbing, hilarious, and odd locations.

It's been 13 years since Elevator: Source. Since its release, our team has consistently discussed returning to Elevator.

Now, we're reviving Elevator as an independent game. Elevator will be replayable with lots of unlockables, easter eggs, fun floors, and multiplayer at heart.

In the original Elevator: Source, floors were merely observed. This time, Elevator is going to take it to the next level.

In this sequel, you'll get to leave the Elevator to solve puzzles, complete strange tasks, conquer minigames, stay away from deadly monsters, and discover many easter eggs!

Elevator will have adventure, humor and outright horror. Each floor is different and absurd, calm or challenging. While you're at it, you can steal trinkets from floors you survived. It's a true to life elevator simulator.

Our inspirations for Elevator are the atmosphere of Half-Life, Portal, liminal spaces, and various video games and movies. You'll take on a ride to everywhere, nowhere, and everything between.

Elevator will be released as a complete, polished experience. No Early Access. We’ll support Elevator beyond release, improving stability, accessibility and potential for future content updates and DLC based on your feedback and interest.

While we’re building Elevator with lots of care and detail, the development cycle shouldn’t go longer than a year. 

Elevator will be playable with lots of friends (up to 8 players), so we're pricing it around $7.99 USD. That’ll cover the complete game, including the demo content and everything added during the development period that we’ll make with your support.

Helping fund Elevator means:

• more floors (we have around 250 floor ideas already!)
• more mechanics, and floor variety
• ambitious concepts like interactions between different floors (bringing objects from one floor to another and having it affect the gameplay)
• better models, animations, music, and more voice acting
• more unique characters, including more hero characters
• more unlockables / player customization
• more Penthouse features
• NPC to NPC interactions
• localization
• and more!

If you and your friends are looking for a multiplayer game with humor, horror, absurdity, and style- We're sure Elevator will be a game you will love as much as we do.

We’ve got an experienced and creative team who cares deeply about gaming, and we have a strong passion for this project.

We need your help to make it bigger and better than ever before!

Game Overview

Elevator is an absurdist, comedy-horror game that can be played single or multiplayer. Every time you play, you’re in for a different ride. What floor will you stop on? Will you escape? Do you want to? The Elevator decides your fate.

At the top, you’ll arrive at the Penthouse- a mysterious apartment that keeps records of your journey, a collection of trinkets from floors, provides strange entertainment, and houses secrets beyond your imagination. Leave the Penthouse whenever you'd like, but the Elevator beckons you back.

• Price Point: $7.99 USD
• Playtime: 2-3 Hours Minimum
• Genres: Absurdist, Comedy, Horror, Multiplayer
• Platforms: Steam
• Players: Up to 8 players at once

• 18 playable floors (+3 floors with echo variations)
• The Lobby and Penthouse
• Steam support
• Online Multiplayer support
• Latest Unreal 5.6 engine (Lumen disabled for performance)
• Controller support (with rumble)
• Voice chat (with fun filters)
• Text chat
• Unlockables
• NPCs with voice systems
• Accessibility options
• Key binding, FOV settings
• Steam Deck support (we actually test on the Steam deck quite a bit! And it's our target hardware)
• NVidia DLSS

And even more! We have around 250 floor concepts already!

Floors have a variety of events that can happen, some with chill landscapes, others with dangerous encounters, puzzles, minigames, laughs, and insanity. Each floor idea we've come up with has been from us trying to get each other to laugh just from the idea, or to reference something we've loved. The goal is to surprise and wonder.

Why We Need Help

We’ve already got a huge game under our belt called Tower Unite, and we’re a team that has always been kept afloat by the generosity and passion of our fanbase. It’s our team’s only standalone game so far, and it’s extremely complicated and content-heavy. 

Our first game prides itself on being a microtransaction-free experience, which is unusual for its genre, and also means our team relies on external funding. We’ve done limited Supporter Packs, run a simple Patreon (which helps cover server costs), and have occasional merch collaborations. The community we already have is insanely awesome, creative, and has our backs - and we couldn’t offer what we do without them. As we’re independently published, these resources help us barely make just enough to pay our team.

We’re a small team (7 developers), and each of us works on multiple disciplines in all our projects. While we wish just Tower Unite was sustainable on its own, it isn’t.

Essentially, we need funding to make Elevator the fully-formed experience it’s intended to be. We want to be able to make a wide variety of different floor experiences, unique environments, encounters, sound design, and character models. We want to make it high quality and accessible. Without help, we can’t bring Elevator to the full potential it has as it stands. 

We’ve worked through plenty of rough times as a team and we have the drive. We want to deliver something fantastic to you all.

We’re asking for your support to make a game that's truly one of a kind!

Funding Breakdown

We've set our initial funding goal to $27,000, which we find to be a starting budget for part 1. Part 1 is the bare minimum (35 floors) to get the game out, and not the full experience. If we raise more funding ($55,000), we can get all two planned parts out at once.

Funds will go straight to the development of the game - to our developers. They’ll pay for the programming, art, and design, and to our floor architects that will make Elevator the game it was always supposed to be. As you'll find in our demo, we've gotten a lot of legwork on the game already and have a solid base, so we will use the funds to expand on what we have.

Beyond just supporting development on its own, having funds will also allow us to offer polish we can’t afford, particularly in the sound and voice department. 

We want to use a small portion of the funding to help find more composers to add music to our game. We also want to reach out to voice actors for our player characters as well as NPCs. There are plenty of opportunities for fun voice acting cameos on different floors which we’d love to be able to pay actors to perform.

We'd also like to explore crossovers!! :D

Stretch Goals

About Us

We’re PixelTail Games, an indie game dev team with history, passion, and ambitious ideas. We grew out of the Half-Life 2 modding community in 2006, creating GMod Tower, and became independent game developers in 2016 with our first game: Tower Unite, a virtual world party game packed with minigames, which we’ve been working on in various forms for nearly 20 years.

Our team works all over the world, and we've been great friends and developed together for 10+ years now! We have extensive experience making games in Unreal Engine and Source Engine.

While working on Tower Unite as a standalone game for over a decade, we have built a community of passionate players who care about quality and see the quality we aim for in our projects.

We're passionate about gaming in general, and we absolutely love making multiplayer games. Our team has extremely talented artists and programmers. But we're more of a show than tell kind of team, so if you really want to see the quality we're aiming for Elevator, please try out our demo.

Other Ways To Help

If you can't help back the project, and you like what you see, then please spread the word!

You can help spread the word by sharing the demo, sharing this Kickstarter, and sharing your fun floor ideas with other players in our Discord!