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There's a specific kind of game that gets harder to make in a market drowning in prestige, edge, and premium storytelling: the platformer genre, particularly the wholesome family adventure aimed squarely at kids. LIFTED, the debut from Adventure Works and former Disney Imagineer Jeffrey Ashbrook, remembers what it was like to be nine years old opening a game box on a Saturday morning. It's a cinematic 2.5D puzzle-platformer, a time-travel adventure, and quietly, an unassuming little history lesson.
Play it as an adult, and you'll admire the craft, chuckle at some of the humor, and see the seams where the design is calibrated for a younger audience. Play it as a kid, or watch a kid play it, and you'll see the game hit exactly the target it was aiming for. This review is written from both perspectives, because the honest answer to "is LIFTED good?" depends heavily on who's holding the controller.
A Disney Imagineer's First Game
The context behind LIFTED matters. Jeffrey Ashbrook, the founder of Adventure Works, spent years as a Disney Imagineer, with credits including Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run at Disney Parks in California and Florida. That pedigree bleeds into every design choice LIFTED makes. This is a game built by someone who understands cinematic pacing, environmental storytelling, and the specific joy of a well-choreographed set piece.
When LIFTED works best, it's during on-the-rails chase sequences and cinematic action beats that feel pulled from a ride designer's playbook. When it stumbles, it's because those set pieces end too soon or don't quite match the ambition their staging suggests.
We previously covered LIFTED's development trajectory, and now that it's shipped, the promise of the pitch mostly lands.
Meet Ari Buktu, Accidental Time Traveler
You play as Ari Buktu, a high school student and self-described slacker who wanders into Professor Lionel Raventhorpe's lab looking for extra credit. Raventhorpe, a physics teacher with a working time machine called the Anytime Elevator, has an ulterior motive: he wants to travel through history to retrieve Nefertari's Tiara as the perfect gift for his longtime love, Dolores Barton, the school's history teacher. Ari, Raventhorpe, and Julius the chinchilla get swept into a time-hopping heist across ancient Egypt, pirate-era Tortuga, and beyond.
Visually, Ari and the Professor have a Rayman-like design without limbs at the joints, which gives them expressive body language despite the cartoonish abstraction. It's a stylistic choice that reads as friendly and family-appropriate without falling into LEGO-style genericness. The character designs across the game are consistently strong, particularly the villains, which we'll get to.
Voice performances from Joe Gaudet and Ray O'Hare carry the game's cinematic ambitions. Both actors give committed performances, particularly in the more emotional beats where LIFTED tries to sell genuine stakes. The supporting cast for the villain roles is also praiseworthy, elevating what could have been throwaway antagonists into performances kids will remember.
A Sneaky Little History Lesson
One nice detail that I particularly liked in the game, as someone who enjoys history in video games: the villains in LIFTED aren't invented for the game. Giovanni Battista Belzoni, his wife Sarah Belzoni, and their servant James Curtin are all real historical figures. Belzoni was an Italian explorer and pioneer archaeologist whose actual career peaked in Egypt around 1817 to 1818, precisely when LIFTED's Egyptian segment is set. He discovered the tomb of Seti I. He was the first to enter the Pyramid of Khafre. He also took Egyptian antiquities for European museums in a way that Britannica dryly notes "might today be regarded as pillage."
That's a smart casting choice. Instead of drawing generic tomb raiders, LIFTED puts kids face to face with real figures from Egyptology's controversial early days. It's not going to teach them deep Egyptian history, but the touchpoints are there, and a curious kid could easily search "who was Belzoni" and fall down a genuinely fascinating rabbit hole about how museums acquired their Egyptian collections. That's the exact kind of educational hook a game like this should aim for.
The same principle applies when Blackbeard, or Edward Teach, shows up as an antagonist in the 1712 Tortuga chapter. Real pirate, real time period, verifiable with a quick search. LIFTED doesn't preach or teach at you. It just quietly puts real historical figures in real eras and lets kids' curiosity do the rest. For a game aimed at younger players, that's a genuine win, and it's the kind of design decision a former Imagineer would gravitate toward.
I still remember when playing Civilization and Assassin's Creed as a student and actually looking up the names I encountered. History can sometimes be more interesting than fiction, especially when you can put a kid inside it, and this kind of exposure is exactly what piques their curiosity enough to have them learn on their own.
Platforming That Kids Can Handle
Mechanically, LIFTED is a 2.5D puzzle-platformer with satisfying, sharp controls, plenty of verticality, and a slow drip of new abilities as you visit each era. Egypt, for example, gives you the grappling hook, which is fun to use and stays useful throughout the game. It also uses physics, making you use momentum and radial measurements to effectively cross gaps.
Tortuga, meanwhile, introduces wall-jumping shoes that open up new traversal puzzles. This "new invention per era" structure works well, giving each historical stop a mechanical identity that keeps the platforming from feeling repetitive.
Climbing has a small but satisfying rhythm mechanic where boost stars appear on crevices in time with your ascent. Hit them right, and you climb faster. It could have felt gimmicky, but it lands as a small skill-expression moment that rewards attention. Small touches like this show up throughout LIFTED, and they add up.
The 3D environments paired with 2D movement create some friction, particularly during moments where the Professor finds shortcuts through terrain that Ari can't access due to invisible walls.
There's a recurring gag where the Professor blithely reaches destinations by routes the player is locked out of, which the game plays for comedy, but it also underlines the linearity of the level design in a way that occasionally makes Ari feel less capable than the story wants him to be. That's a puzzle-platformer convention as much as a design flaw, and kids won't notice, but adult players will occasionally roll their eyes at it.
Difficulty is deliberately forgiving. There are no lives, unlimited retries, and the platforming rarely demands pinpoint precision. When you die, you are almost always respawned right from where you dropped off. Combined with the accessibility settings (more on those in a moment), this makes LIFTED an ideal first platformer for younger kids who might get frustrated by more punishing genre entries.
Puzzles That Won't Stump Anyone
The puzzle side of the puzzle-platformer designation is where LIFTED calibrates most obviously for kids. The puzzles are conceptually clear, generally easy to solve, and don't offer the triumphant satisfaction that adult puzzle fans crave. Some levels let you tackle puzzles in any order you want, which adds pleasant flexibility, but the puzzles themselves rarely challenge you enough to feel like real accomplishments.
The Easy Puzzles accessibility setting makes everything trivial for adults, but could be useful to keep a child from getting stumped and losing interest. With it enabled, Ari talks to himself with hints, and the Professor chimes in with suggestions almost as soon as you approach a puzzle, sometimes before you've had the chance to try anything.
For kids, this is a compassionate design decision that prevents frustration. For adults playing on that setting, it can feel like the game is answering questions you haven't asked yet. If you're an older player who wants to actually work through the puzzles, turn Easy Puzzles off from the settings menu and you'll get the intended experience.
Progression is enriched by collectibles hidden throughout each level, which unlock new outfits for Ari that you can equip immediately from a wardrobe menu. It's a small hook but an effective one for kids: the visual reward of dressing up your character is universal, and the outfits are creative enough to feel worth pursuing.
Small achievements also pop throughout the game, clearly designed to reinforce the accomplishment loop for younger players.
One small friction I hit: there's no dedicated "restart level" button. If you miss a collectible and want to replay a level, you have to head back to the main menu, select the level from there, and start from the beginning. A restart option from the pause menu would be a meaningful quality-of-life win, especially for completionist kids trying to grab everything.
Cinematic Ambition, Uneven Execution
The moments where LIFTED most obviously channels its Imagineer DNA are the on-the-rails chase and action sequences. When the pace explodes (the game's own marketing phrase), LIFTED remembers what it is. These sequences are genuinely thrilling in short bursts, staged with the confidence of someone who knows how to sell a moment.
The problem is that they consistently end too soon, ramping up the tension only to cut to the next puzzle or exploration section before you've fully enjoyed the ride. Every one of these set pieces left me wanting more, which is the right and wrong kind of "wanting more" depending on your mood.
The game's approach to exploration has similar issues. In one early sequence, Ari and the Professor are escorted through the desert valley to the Tomb of Nefertari via cutscene rather than through a playable exploration segment.
It reads as cut content or a design decision to keep pacing tight, but either way, it's a lost opportunity. I imagine kids would have loved to actually run around a desert valley on the way to the pyramid. Adults would have enjoyed the environmental storytelling. Everyone loses when you cutscene through what could have been an adventurous traversal moment.
Audio mixing has some rough edges. Voice performances are consistently strong, but during high-action sequences like the opening chase, the dialogue still sounds studio-recorded, cleanly separated from the environmental audio in a way that reduces immersion.
Voices don't quite match the depth or roughness the scene demands. The echo mixing during tomb and enclosed-space sequences is handled correctly, so the tools are there; they just aren't always applied. There's also no option to keep audio playing when the game window loses focus, which is a small quality-of-life miss.
Some physics quirks stand out too. Character models appear to "respawn" every time they enter into frame, resulting in a very sudden drop of their bodies when they appear. It's most noticeably seen on Ari's hoodie drawstrings, which fall from the air every time he appears on-screen, and it also happens to full character bodies when cutscenes transition into gameplay at the start of a level. Nothing game-breaking, but small immersion-breakers that add up.
Camera behavior was a real concern during my early access playtime. The camera would jump erratically during certain moments, particularly when following Ari's movement. Adventure Works has addressed this in a post-launch patch, and it's no longer an issue now. This is worth noting in case you who watched early gameplay footage and had concerns, though.
The game's dialogue leans hard on camp college humor, with Ari and the Professor exchanging quips throughout the adventure. Some of it lands, though for adult ears, a lot of the humor reads as unamusing at best. For kids, the same jokes will play differently, sitting closer to the goofy energy of a Saturday morning cartoon. Your mileage will absolutely vary based on your age and comedic tolerance.
Themes Bigger Than the Delivery
LIFTED reaches for real emotional territory. The game explores themes of adventure, of losing worldly pleasures because of your dedication to your craft, and of doing everything for love. Professor Raventhorpe built a time machine to impress the woman he loves, which is genuinely charming as a premise.
Ari's own arc touches on curiosity and coming-of-age. There's real writing effort here, and while it doesn't always land with the emotional weight it aims for, the ambition to reach beyond "hit the button, collect the shiny thing" is admirable.
For kids, these themes will land in the way age-appropriate emotional stakes always do: as introductions to bigger ideas they'll grow to appreciate more fully over time. That's a legitimate goal for a family game, and LIFTED handles it with more sincerity than most.
Technical Notes
Across my time with LIFTED on PC, I encountered no gameplay-breaking bugs. Production value is genuinely high for a debut indie title from a small team, and it's clear a lot of love and care has gone into every corner of the game. Performance was stable throughout my playthrough. Steam Deck compatibility is a marketed feature, and I can attest to its performance on the older Steam Deck model.
The game launched on PC via Steam on July 22. PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2 versions are in development and will follow at a later date. Adventure Works has been open about wanting to nail the PC release first before bringing LIFTED to consoles, which is a defensible priority for a small team.
Verdict
LIFTED is a wholesome, well-crafted family adventure game that knows exactly who it's for. As a puzzle-platformer for adult genre fans looking for challenge, deep humor, or environmental storytelling comparable to the best in the space, it doesn't quite hit those marks, and it isn't really trying to.
As a kids' game and an entry point for younger players into cinematic adventure gaming, it's a strong recommendation, and the sneaky educational hook of real historical figures across real time periods gives it something extra that most kid-focused games don't bother with.
If you're a parent or gift-buyer looking for a family game that respects a kid's time and curiosity, LIFTED is easy to recommend. If you're an adult playing solo, temper expectations for the humor and puzzle depth, but stick around for the craft, the historical detail, and the moments where Jeffrey Ashbrook's Imagineer instincts light up the screen. It's a debut game with real personality, real care, and a clear vision of who it wants to hand a controller to.
Score: 7.5/10
GameDaily received a review copy of LIFTED on PC from Stride PR on behalf of Adventure Works for this review.
