Games Like Shell as Hard as Steel

The fate of the modern world: an iron cage. Society organizes itself around efficiency, calculation and control, and every institution ends up subordinated to that logic. The structures that progress erects become so rational and so autonomous that they keep running on their own, long after they have lost the purpose that created them. An order that no one fully governs any more, and that shapes the life of the whole society dwelling inside it.

THE GAME

Iron Cage is a first-person psychological horror game. You are an elevator repair technician sent out on a night shift to restore service to the elevator of the tallest office tower in the city. The task seems simple: calibrate the elevator, climb 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'll have to reconstruct each missing measurement from the clues left behind by those 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. You deploy a remote camera that sweeps every floor. You move, rotate, light up and zoom in, watching it all on the monitor.

Decipher. Somewhere on each floor the height of the next destination lies hidden. Find it, decipher it and memorize it; then enter it on the information screen to set your course.

Operate. Pull the lever, release the brake and eject the elevator upward. Get the height right and you arrive. Get it wrong and you go into free fall, having to make an emergency stop before the cable snaps.

FEATURES

You go up. None of those left inside ever made it down.