Games Like Shell as Hard as Steel

The fate of the modern world: a shell as hard as steel. Society organises itself around efficiency, calculation and control, and every institution ends up subordinate to that logic. The structures progress raises become so rational and so self-sufficient that they keep running on their own long after losing the purpose that created them. An order nobody fully governs any more, and one that shapes the life of the entire society living inside it.

THE GAME

Shell as Hard as Steel is a first-person psychological horror game. You are an elevator repair technician sent out on a night shift to put the elevator of the city's tallest office tower back into service. The job sounds simple: calibrate the elevator, ride up floor by floor and repair the traction system at the very top.

But nothing inside the building adds up. Every floor sits at a different height and the official blueprints are useless. To keep climbing, you will have to reconstruct each missing measurement from the traces left behind by the people who were trapped inside.

You inspect each floor through the grainy monitor of a remote camera, piecing together little by little what happened after the elevator failed.

GAMEPLAY

Explore. Deploy a remote camera that sweeps each floor. Move, rotate, light it up and zoom in, watching it all on the monitor.

Decipher. Somewhere on every floor, the height of your next destination is hidden. Find it, work it out and commit it to memory; then enter it on the information screen to set your course.

Operate. Tension the lever, release the brake and launch the car upward. Get the height right and you arrive. Get it wrong and you go into free fall, with an emergency brake to pull before the cable snaps.

FEATURES

You go up. Not one of the people left inside ever made it down.