All spoilers for the game will be left unmarked in the trope examples below. You Have Been Warned!
> [...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:
- Boom, Headshot!: In the HELP ending, where both Protag and Co-Worker get their heads blown off by Instant Death Bullets.
- Bottomless Pits: Floor 9 is this- for Protag, at least. Normal Guy and Co-Worker are fine.
- Character Death: Protag dies the most, but Co-Worker can also die in certain endings.
- Color-Coded Speech: Each character speaks in different colored text. Protag gets red, Co-Worker gets teal, and so on.
- 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 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.
- Drone of Dread: After each death, before the reset, a brief, monotonous, droning beep plays.
- 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. - 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.
- 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.
- 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) 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.
- 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.
- Live Item: A rat that can be retrieved from a vent on the wall.
- 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.
- Nightmarish Nursery: Floor 4, which takes the form of a children’s bedroom.
- 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.
- Ominous Visual Glitch: Used throughout the HIRED ending, where the game interface glitches intermittently as the text and images progress.
- Only One Save File: And no manual saving, either!
- 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 ending, Co-Worker tells Protag he'll see him on their break.
- 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.
- 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.
