Iron Lung

A very interesting experiment in limited senses and unexplained phenomena. Pressure builds through trenches and mysteries, unexplained photographs and redacted terminal entries only bring more questions, and the world all of this builds is one that can be pretty harrowing at times. But does it do anything beyond some goosebumps and scares? Not really, no. The small package is perfect for what it brings to the table, it's just going to leave you hungry unless you really put in the imaginative work on your end to complete the experience yourself. Definitely worth a few bucks and a couple hours.

In Iron Lung, players are tasked with navigating a submarine through a blood sea on a moon to "investigate an anomaly." Whatever the hell that means. I understand that existential, cosmic horror relies largely on the fear of the unknown, but there are so many unknowns in this game that it begins to feel like a cop-out. Why did the Quiet Rapture (the game's name for the disappearance of every planet and star in the universe) occur? No one knows. Who is the player, and what did they do to get put in this dinky submarine? No one knows. Where did the blood sea come from? No one knows. In the submarine's database, you can try to find out more about all of these things, but the game indicates that key portions of the database entries have been redacted for some mysterious, presumably terrifying reason. Developer David Szymanski seems content to shroud the narrative in as much mystery as possible. Adding in a little mystery can often be an effective horror story-telling tactic (see the Silent Hill series: the mysterious town of Silent Hill makes players eager to explore and learn more about it and thereby draws players into the game's setting). But here it just feels like Szymanski is disguising the game's lack of a narrative with shallow insinuations that there's something more beneath the surface. Was the information in the data entries really redacted to create a more immersive story, or did Szymanski sprinkle in a few [REDACTED]'s to evade the hard work of coming up with a compelling narrative? I don't mean to suggest that Szymanski is too lazy or incompetent to create a compelling story (I actually find the premise of the Quiet Rapture unique and decently interesting), but rather that he relies far too heavily on the easy narrative crutch of leaving questions unanswered.

This wouldn't be too much of an issue if the gameplay were more engrossing, but the unfortunate reality is that Iron Lung plays like a repetitive, boring geometry problem. With tank controls. In order to reach and subsequently photograph the bones and tubes and other "spooky" inanimate objects resting on the ocean floor, players have to navigate their submarine to the correct coordinates using four buttons: two control whether you go forward or backward, while the other two control the direction your submarine faces. It should be noted that it's possible to beat this game using only two of the buttons (the forward button and one of the change-direction buttons). This realization that two of the buttons were completely superfluous really bothered me and made me start to wonder whether there was a better way of designing the submarine's control scheme. Why, for instance, was there not a number pad into which players could type their exact desired angle, press enter, and have the submarine rotate accordingly? Would that not be preferable to the way the game controls currently? As it is now, a player will often have to press and hold the rotate-angle-clockwise button for like ten seconds, only to find that once they've released the button, they've gone about 0.08 degrees too far and now have to quickly press and release the rotate-angle-counterclockwise button and pray that they haven't gone another 0.16 degrees too far in the other direction. It's such an unintuitive input method that I'm left wondering if there's a narrative justification for it: maybe all the good submarine interface designers died in the Quiet Rapture? Hopefully Szymanski will answer this in the next lore update, when he reveals that [REDACTED] is behind it all.

I've heard from several sources that this game does an excellent job of building tension, but the dull gameplay completely deflates any tension created by the audio and visual design (I'm okay with the audio, for the record, but I think that the low-poly art style is becoming a little repetitive nowadays in indie horror games, even if it is probably a pretty cost-effective means of developing in 3D). The game fails to develop its navigational mechanic over the course of its one-hour playtime, leaving players to repeatedly calculate the shortest distance between two points on a map. That's about it. There's no challenge to speak of because the game gives the player an infinite amount of time to get to the next point on the map, and the control scheme is so simplistic that it takes very little time to master. The game almost does something interesting when blood starts to leak into the submarine and stops just before it submerges the navigational controls. When this happened in my play-through, I thought that the blood would keep rising, increasing the tension of the gameplay by giving me only a limited amount of time to reach the final objective, but instead the blood merely stops at a predetermined point, removing any time pressure and collapsing the tension completely.

The worst part of this game is undoubtedly the ending, though. After photographing a giant eyeball, the player navigates to the last objective and turns around in order to take a photograph but dies when a fish eats him. In his very first confrontation with the monster, our protagonist immediately dies before he can even see a damn picture of him. What was the point? Instead of ending the game immediately after having such a sudden jump-scare, why not have the player see the photograph of the monster to increase the tension? Then when they see the photo, they could hear banging on the outside of the submarine, and maybe they have to race to a final objective while the monster violently attacks the submarine. But once they've taken the final photograph, they find it depicts another downed submarine with a big bite taken out of it. Then BAM - the fish kills you in a jump-scare. Maybe my proposed ending is cliche but it's a hell of a lot better than the fish just immediately killing you with no build-up.

I normally would play a game like this, be mildly annoyed by the fact that I wasted an hour playing it, and move on with my life, but the sheer praise I've seen from all corners of the Internet has completely baffled me. For instance, I recently read Vice's effusively glowing review of this game, in which they call Iron Lung "one of the most terrifying games [they] have ever played." They even suggest that Iron Lung is "a game that evokes the end of a broken world, one defined by cruel systems which we built foolishly. From now on, when I think of the systemic death spiral at the heart of capitalism, I will imagine an iron lung." I have no clue how they arrived at capitalism given how barebones the story is in this game, but to me, Iron Lung is about as enjoyable as living in an iron lung.

Final rating: 1/5

Menos, né gente. Bem menos.

Iron Lung is a great example of how powerful of an experience you can create in horror media with very little. You play as an individual stranded on a sub, and for the price of your freedom you are tasked with sailing to specific coordinates on the map. The trick is that there is no window, so you really must navigate using only the GPS, the map and the sonar that warns you of close obstacles (which means game over on collision. The game features lofi art style that wouldnt be out of place in the late 1990's., and that uncaniness it brings adds to the horror.

The atmosphere is thick and thats what makes it so frigtning. The sound design is incredible, as you journey through the depths of the blood sea with no sight. You get the ability to photograph your surroundings, and the slight delay until you get the image is incredibly unnerving.

Its really hard to discuss a game like this without spoiling it, as it only lasts 1 hour and has pratically no replay value. That said, for people who are fans of horror media, this is bound to be one of the highlights of the year.