A Puzzle Game About Avoiding the Most Awkward Thing Possible: Facing Someone in an Elevator

A game made for a certain CEO

There is that moment when you step into an elevator behind someone and, as they turn to face the doors, you deliberately hold your ground and happen to meet their gaze. No, you would not do that. Everyone knows that inside a lift you must never face the other occupants unless you already know them and are mid-conversation. Just yesterday I boarded a lift with a colleague who sits at the desk next to mine, and I kept my eyes glued to my phone until we had safely left the building. In the puzzle game How To Ride Elevators Like A Human, you take on the role of a helpful alien who rescues people who have somehow found themselves in the dire predicament of staring at one another.

Each brief puzzle unfolds in a compact lift where one (or several) humans begin locked in mutual glares. Using your little UFO’s tractor beam, you must lift and reposition the passengers until no one is looking at anyone else. You may well spot this as a sokoban-style puzzle game, but even while revisiting familiar territory, I am a great fan of this extraterrestrial framing. Even if I do have an ulterior motive for featuring this game…

Image credit: Nevele11

But I will return to that in a moment.

The puzzles quickly grow more complicated, with elevators holding ever more passengers, spaces in the lift occupied by immovable heavy luggage bags, and small children adding a two-level challenge to the lines of sight. (Adults can see over the children, but the children can look up at the adults. The best solution is to make them stare at some luggage.)

Image credit: Nevele11

How To Ride Elevators Like A Human is a little janky, and it should not take long to race through its ten levels in the Steam demo, but I will admit that the main reason I am writing about How To Ride Elevators Like A Human is 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 in addition to the detail that she is 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 never turn to face the doors. They meet eyes with everyone they can, like the monsters they are.”

So, when I happened to stumble 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 required two. You are standing too close to me, Sharma, back up.