A free first-person psychological horror game from ACID DROP, where you never leave the elevator, available during Steam Next Fest.

The Shell as Hard as Steel demo is a free first-person psychological horror game from the independent studio ACID DROP. According to the developer, you play an elevator repair technician sent to work the night shift in the tallest building in the city, and you stay inside the elevator for the whole game. The demo is on Steam and itch.io, and the game is part of Steam Next Fest.

According to the press kit, the title comes from Max Weber’s stahlhartes Gehäuse, literally “a shell as hard as steel” and better known in English as the “iron cage”: the sociologist’s image of a society organized around efficiency, calculation and control. The studio says that idea runs through the whole game.

How It Plays

A short video intro tells the story of the merger between the companies. After that, a phone call, with audio only, assigns you the job of repairing an elevator in a building that belongs to them. The demo starts on the sidewalk in front of the building on a rainy night, with great atmosphere. You carry your tools into the elevator, and from there you never leave it. You climb floor by floor and investigate everything from inside the elevator, using the equipment you install.

Each floor works like a small puzzle, built around a few panels:

• Height panel: It shows the current floor’s height and the next floor’s height, measured from the ground. The first height is given to you. I played more than once, and the height numbers were different in each playthrough, which adds replay value. The floors are miscalibrated, so you have to enter the next height on the panel to reach them.
• Ejection force panel: After setting the height, you adjust the ejection force, no more and no less. If you overshoot or fall short, the elevator starts to fall. If you’re quick, you can use the individual brakes to avoid dying, then readjust the force.
• Capture viewer: The floors are explored through an exploration module with a camera and lights, and you examine what happened on each one. That is how you find the height of the next floor. The viewer also lets you review the photos the module took.
• Module panel: It holds the module’s controls, and through it you see the outside of the floors.

🎧 Horror in a closed space lives on sound. A comfortable gaming headset makes every creak and hum of the elevator hit harder.

My Impressions

The demo is quite short, but the atmosphere works even with simple graphics. Fans of ray tracing and high-resolution textures can skip this one. In a short time it builds a mysterious mood around the merger and how it affected the employees, and things apparently did not go well. No spoilers. You have to collect clues to move up the floors, in a mysterious and bloody tone. There is one more mystery to investigate: when the camera takes a photo, it seems to show a little more than just the environment. I found it interesting.

Languages and Controls

According to the press kit, the game is localized into 29 languages, interface and subtitles, including English, French, German, Italian, Spanish (Spain and Latin America), Brazilian and European Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese. It is also fully playable with a controller. I played with an Xbox controller, and it felt well adapted. I played in English, and the language selector in the menu does list plenty of options.

🎮 Prefer playing on the couch? A wireless controller works well with the game, according to my experience with an Xbox pad.

Technical Notes

I ran into some difficulties: the game showed errors a few times and the screen froze. This may depend on my setup, so your experience may vary. The demo is still fairly simple. It has no resolution or fullscreen/windowed option in the menu, so I used the old Alt+Enter to toggle. There is a language selector, brightness calibration, mouse sensitivity and sound sliders (ambient, music, sound effects and more). This is a demo, and these points may change.

Content Note

The game is a horror title with a bloody tone, so it may not suit everyone. Check the age rating on the Steam page.

Play the Demo

Free demo on Steam: Shell as Hard as Steel | Also on itch.io: ACID DROP

Images courtesy of the developer.

Disclosure: the developer contacted QG Reloaded and provided press material. I played the free demo only, and this post was not paid for.

As an Amazon Associate, QG Reloaded earns from qualifying purchases.