The loon is already laughing.
Obata has stated in interviews that the game was inspired by a real sign she saw as a child in a defunct elevator in Duluth: a handwritten note taped to the control panel that read simply, “LOONS ELEVATOR DOES NOT GO TO ROOF.” She never learned what that meant. The game’s final puzzle requires the player to stop trying to reach the top floor and instead pry open the doors between floors, climbing out into a false sky painted on concrete—only to realize the whole hotel is underwater. In a strange twist of life imitating art, the U.S. Forest Service and the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources announced in 2023 a pilot project unofficially nicknamed the “Loons Elevator.” It is not a joke. Due to rising water levels and changing nesting patterns, common loons in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness have begun attempting to nest on artificial structures—including the old fire towers and logging lift platforms abandoned decades ago. The DNR has constructed two prototype “loon lifts”: slow-moving, net-enclosed platforms that gently raise loon nests by approximately six feet over the course of a season, keeping eggs dry as reservoirs swell. loons elevator
Conservationists have mixed feelings. “It’s an absurd image,” admits Dr. Henry Yellowbanks, an ornithologist. “A loon on an elevator. But we’ve changed the water levels so fast that evolution can’t keep up. So yes, we are now building elevators for birds that evolved to dive. That’s the Anthropocene in a nutshell.” So what is the Loons Elevator? It is a ghost mine shaft in Minnesota. It is a recurring nightmare of water and wires. It is a two-hour indie game with a very good soundtrack. It is a desperate conservation tool for a climate-changed world. But more than any of these, the Loons Elevator is a beautiful contradiction —a machine that denies its own purpose, a bird that refuses its own nature, a ride that only goes somewhere you never wanted to go. The loon is already laughing
Online forums dedicated to “weird dreams” are filled with first-person accounts. One user, Northwoods_Nightmare , writes: “It’s always the same. I get in. No buttons. The door closes. The loon outside says ‘Going up… to the bottom.’ Then we plunge. My ears pop. Water seeps through the crack. And just before I drown, I hear that laugh— ha-ha-ha-hooo-ooo —and I wake up gasping.” The phrase gained a second, more playful life with the release of the cult indie game Loon Elevator by solo developer Maya Obata. The game is a two-hour point-and-click puzzle set in a single, malfunctioning elevator in a brutalist hotel. The elevator is haunted by a loon—specifically, a loon who believes it is the hotel manager. The loon, voiced with a clipped Midwestern accent, offers cryptic advice (“Second floor: linens, lost dreams, and a very good pike fishery”), but every third button pressed sends the player to the “Negative Lobby,” a flooded basement filled with floating, judgmental birds. In a strange twist of life imitating art, the U
To understand the Loons Elevator, one must first abandon the literal. Loons—the black-and-white waterbirds known for their haunting, wailing calls—are not creatures that naturally ascend. They are divers, not climbers. They are heavy-boned, built for pressure and depth, requiring a near-miraculous running start across water to achieve flight. An elevator, by contrast, is a pure vertical servant: smooth, enclosed, and antithetical to the wild. To fuse these two concepts is to create an immediate paradox—a machine that carries a creature that was never meant to ride. The most concrete historical reference comes from the now-defunct Vermilion Iron Range in northern Minnesota, a region thick with lakes and, yes, common loons. In the late 1890s, the Vermilion Mining Company built a peculiar vertical shaft elevator not for ore, but for workers and supplies at a remote outpost called “Loon Lake Station.” The shaft descended 400 feet into a diabase sill, but crucially, it did not stop at the bottom.