> [...You need this job.]
[The elevator doesn’t have anyone inside when it opens for you.]
— Intro Narration
Elevator Hitch, released on September 28th, 2022, is an independently developed visual novel made by Studio Investigrave (Comprised of RachelDrawsThis and Ekrixart, with an original soundtrack composed by BellKalengar) for the 2022 Spooktober Visual Novel Jam on Itch.io. Set in a 70s-themed office elevator, Elevator Hitch is an escape room/surreal horror game with multiple endings. Created using RPG Maker, the game makes use of both classic visual novel-style CGs and sprites, as well as a small 3D environment with point-and-click interactivity.
In the game, you play as the unnamed protagonist (referred to simply as ‘Protag’ by the developers and fans), who is a soon-to-be employee on his way to a job interview. After stepping into the elevator, and allowing another employee of the company to board, the elevator malfunctions on its ascent, leaving you and your future co-worker to find a way to fix the issue. Funnily enough, the broken elevator may end up proving to be the least of your problems, however, when you find yourself being taken to increasingly disturbing locations whilst moving between each floor of the building.
Elevator Hitch contains examples of:
- Battle Amongst the Flames: Protag and Co-Worker wind up going out this way in one of the loops that leads to the NO SMOKING ending, with Protag so desperate to get the lighter off of Co-Worker before he has the burnt cigarette and Co-Worker so stubborn about giving it to him that they don't even notice that Co-Worker's lit cigarette has fallen to the floor and set the elevator ablaze until the flames start to consume them too.
- Boom, Headshot!: In the HELP ending, where both Protag and Co-Worker get their heads blown off by the Instant Death Bullets fired by the company help squad they waited the allotted thirty seconds for.
- Bottomless Pits: Floor 9 is this- for Protag, at least. Normal Guy and Co-Worker are fine, perhaps because this is only Protag's interview, whereas Co-Worker and Normal Guy have presumably passed theirs long before the start of the game.
- Character Death: Protag dies the most, but Co-Worker can also die in certain endings.
- Chunky Salsa Rule: It's pretty obvious that both Co-Worker and Protag are dead before they even hit the floor when whatever Manuel sends in the HELP ending arrives and shoots them both in the head with a massive shotgun blast, reducing everything above their necks to a mess of blood and viscera.
- Color-Coded Speech: Each character speaks in different colored text. Protag gets red, Co-Worker gets teal, and so on. The alternate version of Protag you meet is given dark blue, the alternate version of Co-Worker is given a brighter, more orange red, and Normal Guy's is white.
- Closed Circle: Protag and Co-Worker are trapped in an elevator, with the main goal being to reach the top floor, and escape.
- Curiosity Killed the Cast: Seen on most floors. If Protag has the option to investigate something further, it’s more likely than not that he’ll die because of it if the player doesn’t know what they’re doing.
- Death as Game Mechanic: For all but one ending, the game sends you back to the start after you’ve died. Except, Protag remembers each time he dies, and you retain your inventory. Some puzzles actually require you to have died at least once before being able to actually solve them.
- Death by Pragmatism: In the HELP ending, which consists of the player clicking the CALL button in the broken elevator, and waiting for rescue.
- Dialogue Tree: The way the player, as Protag, interacts with the other characters.
- Downer Ending: Not a single one of the possible endings is a happy one, including the secret ending unlocked once you've triggered all the deaths in a single playthrough. Take a moment to consider that there's fifteen of them.
- Drone of Dread: After each death, before the reset, a brief, monotonous, droning beep plays.
- Eaten Alive: Floor 3 is a giant mouth that eats Protag alive if he doesn't put it to sleep first.
- Enter Solution Here: To gain access to Floor 9, the player must input a code they got from Floor 2 into a computer on the wall.
- Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": The characters’ official monikers are Protag, Co-Worker, and Normal Guy. The former two do have actual names, but RachelDrawsThis confirmed on Twitter
that they’ll never be revealed (or at least not to each other.)
- Evil Doppelgänger: On Floor 8, Protag and Co-Worker come across alternate versions of themselves that have been stuck in an impossibly adjacent elevator for far longer than them. The origin of the doppelgängers isn’t explained, but it's clear they aren't quite the same as the pair we follow (and thus can't simply be them months' worth of loops down the line), as they state when pressed to their limit that they've been in there with no buttons to make it move since they arrived and that the door hasn't opened for anything since before our Protag and Co-Worker arrived. However, if you see enough of their dialogue, and don't just fall for the alternate Protag's rather thinly-veiled facade, it's obvious that the two of them are less evil and more utterly terrified that they'll be stuck in that room with no one but each other, a pair of scissors, and the endless walls for company for the rest of eternity and no way to know how much time is passing, and Co-Worker picking on Protag afterwards over tricking them for the scissors and leaving them there quickly reveals that Protag is fully aware of that fact, given that he responds to it by stabbing his face over and over again to the point of it being beyond recognition in a guilt-fueled, delusional frenzy in the REAL ending.
- Evil Elevator:
- The game starts as this, with the elevator malfunctioning and stopping mid-ascent. It turns into a Hellevator for the rest of the game, though, with multiple stops.
- Later on, after cutting the wall of the elevator, it’s revealed that the elevator has fleshy bits behind its wallpaper, alluding to its possible sentience.
- Evil, Inc.: Implied throughout the story, but most prominently in the ESCAPE and HIRED endings.
- Expendable Clone: After convincing Protag’s alternate self to hand over the scissors he has, the original Protag traps both his and Co-Worker’s doppelgängers inside the elevator once again. Their fates are left ambiguous. Co-Worker poking at Protag and calling him manipulative and cold-hearted for it (whether he meant it as a compliment or not is ambiguous) and inadvertently insinuating that Protag did in fact only see them as expendable results in him snapping and murdering Co-Worker viciously in a guilt-fueled frenzy in the REAL ending.
- Facial Horror: Protag and Co-Worker both suffer this fate, in different endings. Protag in the HIRED ending, and Co-Worker in the REAL ending.
- Fast-Killing Radiation: Floor 5 is a spent nuclear fuel chamber, and the radiation from it kills Protag (and presumably, Co-Worker, given that he mentions feeling its effects too) after just over 15 seconds of being in the room.
- "Groundhog Day" Loop: Protag is sent back to when the elevator first breaks after each time he dies. He remembers everything, and while Co-Worker claims he doesn’t, he does cryptically allude to past events in a way that calls the truth of that claim into question.
- I'll Kill You!: Protag’s doppelgänger says this after he and Co-Worker’s doppelgänger are trapped in their elevator again.
- Initiation Ceremony: Floor 9’s interview reads as this- as if the getting there part wasn’t hard enough already. There's no good outcome to passing or failing it, in the end: either you get violently turned by Normal Guy into a mindless drone in front of a horrified Co-Worker in the HIRED ending, or you're condemned to stay with the company as a miserable corporate slave for the rest of your days with no possible exit or escape in the ESCAPE ending.
- It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time: Convinced that Co-Worker has been replaced by his alternate self in the REAL ending, Protag kills him off-screen with the stolen scissors, and follows the action by stabbing Co-Worker’s face beyond recognition, only seeming to realize that this wasn't the greatest or most rational choice when the elevator opens on him doing this in front of a room full of his other coworkers.
- Live Item: A rat that can be retrieved from a vent on the wall, which you wind up feeding to the hole in the wall on Floor 2 in order to get the code to use with the CD from the mouth in order to finally unlock Floor 9.
- Lock and Key Puzzle: Given that this is a room escape game, most of the puzzles tend to be in this style. Only once is it used in a literal sense.
- Matchlight Danger Revelation: When you use Co-Worker’s lighter to light up Floor 3, it’s revealed you’re standing inside of a giant mouth.
- Multiple Endings: 15 of them, to be exact. One of them is a secret ending, which is only accessible after obtaining all other endings in a single playthrough. It’s not even a happy ending, on top of that.
- Nameless Narrative: With the exception of the help service employee Manuel, who's only featured in one scene and is never shown his appearance, and not counting Co-Worker’s presumably fake names, none of the characters in the game are given or called with a proper name, full or not.
- Nightmarish Nursery: Floor 4, which takes the form of a children’s bedroom. Protag's reaction to it (labeling it as looking like his childhood bedroom, to the point of all of your options of things to mention about it to Co-Worker before you enter turning out to be true of the room and the puzzle inside it once you enter), and his visible distress in the narration and his reactions pointing to his experiences in said bedroom as a child not being great ones really don't help the energy of the whole thing, either.
- Nothing Is Scarier: On Floor 2, when faced with a pitch black hole in the wall which leads to Darkness Equals Death if examined. Also seen on Floor 3, which is entirely dark, at first, and also leads to the same fate if explored further without a light.
- Not So Stoic: In a Freeze-Frame Bonus moment during the BUTCHERED ending, Co-Worker can be spotted watching Protag get speared by the meat hooks and dragged off to his doom with Wide Eyes and Shrunken Irises and sweat dripping down his face, giving a fairly big clue that he's not nearly as detached from Protag's The Many Deaths of You as he might initially seem. His reaction is similar in the HIRED ending, clearly terrified for him and Protag when he fails his interview with Normal Guy and he approaches with bloody hands to make Protag into a mindless worker drone.
- Ominous Visual Glitch: Used throughout the HIRED ending, where the game interface glitches intermittently as the text and images progress, as well as during the REAL and the STRANGER DANGER endings, which are a pretty clear cue that the doppelgängers aren't exactly to be trusted, if their disheveled appearances and the alternate Protag's Dissonant Serenity smile weren't enough to cue you in.
- Only One Save File: And no manual saving, either, though you reset right back to the elevator after you die or restart, offsetting the lack of having no save capabilities.
- The Outsider Befriends the Best: The first person Protag meets in the office is a senior employee- who’s related to the CEO, no less. During the game's ESCAPE ending (implied to basically be the game's true ending as the Omega Ending you unlock after getting every death seems to continue off of the themes of it), Co-Worker tells Protag he'll see him on their break, allowing him to keep the lighter he borrowed until then in a rather uncharacteristic moment of apparently sincere kindness.
- Point-and-Click Game: Most of the gameplay that isn’t reading textboxes and dialogue trees consists of players clicking around the rooms on each floor to solve puzzles.
- Primal Fear: Invoked a lot in this game, the most obvious being Protag’s fear of heights shown on Floor 9.
- Psychedelic Comedy Bromance: Protag and Co-Worker serve as an Odd Couple-adjacent duo, constantly thrust into surreal and terrifying situations by the elevator they’re stuck inside of.
- Respawn Point: Inside of the elevator, right after it breaks.
- Room Escape Game: The main objective of the game is to get the elevator you’re stuck in to go to the correct floor, so you can get to your interview, and your future coworker can get to his meeting. Though by a few loops in, the objective quickly morphs into a secondary, but just as important goal: find a way to get out so that you and your coworker aren't stuck dying over and and over again in there forever, or worse, sitting alone in there together for eternity with nothing happening like the alternate version of you and him you meet.
- Scrolling Text: Which is often interrupted, either by another character speaking, or the character who was speaking… well, dying.
- Sickening Slaughterhouse: Floor 7 is this, to the point where blood covers everything in the room.
- Surprisingly Sudden Death: The deaths are, more often than not, Jump Scares. These usually cause the characters- and the narration, by extension- to be Killed Mid-Sentence.
- Surreal Horror: With its inexplicable giant mouth rooms, fleshy elevators, and impossible architecture, Elevator Hitch most definitely makes good on its claim to be this.
- Talker and Doer: Where Co-Worker, the stereotypical silver-tongued salesman, is the Talker- and Protag, the nerve-wracked yet determined new hire, is the Doer.
- The Many Deaths of You: The game has a unique set of CGs displayed for each death, and just about every death ends in you (and occasionally your Co-Worker) dying horrifically and being sent back to the elevator, to the point that getting every death is an unlock criteria for the Omega Ending.
- Wide Eyes and Shrunken Irises: The alternate version of Protag you meet boasts a rather terrifying edition of this whenever his version of Co-Worker gets overexcited to be making conversation with you and says too much if you decide to talk to him instead directly. Protag himself pulls a similar expression too in the aftermath, staring at Co-Worker like this right before he snaps and kills him with the scissors he stole in the REAL ending.
- Yank the Dog's Chain:
- To clear Floor 8, Protag lies to Fake Protag that if the latter gives him the scissors, he'll allow Fake Protag and Fake Coworker to take the place of himself and Coworker. Fake Protag happily agrees, and Protag hits the close button, revealing that he was lying the whole time just to get the scissors.
- This happens to Protag himself at the end of the game. After he finally succeeds in leaving the elevator, he is reminded that he needs the job and thus can't actually quit working for the company.
- Your Head Asplode: What happens to Protag and Co-Worker in the HELP ending, after obeying Manuel and waiting the thirty seconds for the company's help center to arrive, as Co-Worker is summarily executed by shotgun blast by the people sent and Protag follows not long after.