The Elevator Game

Trapper is a private detective of the equine variety, and he’s been called in to assist the police in investigating the mysterious death of the mare Serene Lotus, who was seen to be behaving oddly before her death…

Like Owlor’s other games, this game borrows the anthropomorphised pony aesthetic of My Little Pony, but really it’s a neat noir/horror mix based on the urban legend of the Elevator Game, and evidently by the stories surrounding Elisa Lam’s death.

If you’re familiar with the urban legend, then it will perhaps be the implementation rather than the reveal of the core mystery that draws you in. If you aren’t: look past the benign-looking illustrations to the weird and horrifying amongst the mundane. Owlor’s line illustrations are used to great effect here (note, though, that the illustrations are not described in the text), and the screenplay-like format gives the sense of distance, of watching in from a CCTV ourselves.

The Elevator Game is a satisfyingly creepy implementation of an urban legend/creepy story that has made its rounds in certain corners of popular media.

This is the second elevator-game based Ectocomp game I've played this year. Both are effective in their own way, but while Going Down derived it's effectiveness from understatement, The Elevator Game is much more in-your-face.

Like Owlor's other games, this game is loosely based on My Little Pony (in the sense that the characters are ponies with a similar art style), but otherwise the mythology and other world building details are different.

The game is fully illustrated, with some of Owlor's best work here, particularly in a sequence when you watch the elevator game taking place through a security camera and 'pausing' the camera reveals hidden objects.

I think that, for what Owlor is going for, this is a real success. But I found the horror to be a bit too over-the-top to be really effective; I'd like more moments where things were left to my imagination.