Maybe you’ve seen the news about Iron Lung, the scary movie that started strong last week. It took the number two spot in the US box office charts, only behind another scary movie by Sam Raimi called Send Help. Iron Lung’s success is probably because it’s linked to famous YouTuber Mark Edward Fischbach – better known as Markiplier. He clearly loved this project since he paid for it himself, wrote it, directed it, and acted in it too. But no matter what people say about the movie (opinions are mixed), its big success finally made me check out the game it’s based on. I had it on my Steam wish list for a long time. And yes, it’s a really good game.
Iron Lung, if you’re new to this like I was, is made by developer David Szymanski. He’s known for the scary retro shooter game Dusk. But Szymanski also makes many dark, experimental small horror games – and Iron Lung fits right in this category. It’s a scary story set in a far future where all habitable planets and stars have disappeared in an event called The Quiet Rapture. The few humans left alive on space stations are fighting for survival as the universe’s remaining resources run out – so they start an expedition to AT-5, a distant moon where they found a strange ocean of blood.
Iron Lung looks simple. It’s old-fashioned, with basic textures and graphics from the PlayStation 1 era. It has only one small location, barely wider than your arm. The game takes about 45 minutes to finish and only uses 150mb of space on your computer. But don’t let that fool you; this is the kind of thick, scary horror that starts bad and gets worse. You – a prisoner who joined this dangerous mission to earn your freedom – begin your trip locked inside the Iron Lung; a dirty, cramped submarine that’s been welded shut in the hope it can handle the pressure of the blood ocean’s deep waters.
At first, as you slowly go down, you hear someone talking to you from outside. But soon their words get lost in static noise when you reach your depth and the front window is closed. And as the silence comes, the already scary feeling gets more uncomfortable. It doesn’t help that your goal – and how to do it – isn’t clear right away. But after looking around the submarine’s dirty inside and checking the tools you have, you’ll start to understand things. In front is a control panel to move your sub back and forth and turn it. In back is a mysterious computer with a blank screen and a glowing camera button. You’ll soon learn your job is to navigate the winding path under the blood ocean and take pictures of important spots on your map – being careful not to hit your fragile sub against the dangerous rock walls, which would end your trip early.
There’s a problem though: your sub has no windows, no easy way to see the world outside, and you have no navigation tools except for a dirty paper map of the path. This means you’re steering the sub completely blind – guessing where you are by comparing the hard-to-read grid marks on your map with the ones on your ship’s screen. You’re not completely cut off from the outside world, though. At any time, you can press the camera button at the back of your sub to take a picture of what’s around you. But these dirty, fuzzy black and white pictures are just small pieces of a huge, unknown world, and they hint at a dark world so scary that it often feels better not to look at all.
