![]() ![]() Do you have your calculations wrong, or could it be something else?Įven more so than most horror games, Iron Lung builds tension through exceptional sound design. There are moments where you’re looking at the map and you feel like you shouldn’t be close to a wall, but for some reason, your motion sensor starts beeping at you. The game is also at its best when it’s making you question the rules it has set up. Short horror games often have a habit of devolving into jump scares, but Iron Lung keeps your brain busy with numbers and course adjustments just enough that it can sneak up on you. It’s a finicky process, but focusing on minutiae does a great job of lulling you into a rhythm and keeping you from bracing yourself for surprises. ![]() There’s a simple tension that comes from blindly navigating your sub, constantly looking at the map to try to figure out what you are to make sure you don’t crash your sub. The minimalist gameplay here may seem limiting to some, but it’s one of the game’s smartest design decisions. Having the player walk around forces you to confront the claustrophobia of your situation, immediately setting a tense atmosphere, and the clunkiness of the technology makes it feel that much more dangerous and desperate of a mission. There’s a delay between hitting the camera button and the image popping up, almost like a dot matrix printer putting together this grainy, black and white image of the ocean floor. You have to physically walk around the cramped space to press the various buttons rather than just doing it through some slicker user interface. So much of this is a very tactile and crunchy experience. The only two points of interaction in your sub are a control panel in the front to steer, and a big button in the back that takes a photo for you to examine the outside world on a grainy screen. Your porthole has been welded shut due to the mounting pressure at your depths, so your only way of knowing where you are is a set of coordinates and a map of the ocean floor. Part of the early game fun is figuring out what you are supposed to do and how to move the submarine around without being able to see the outside world. The intro text states that there’s no time to train the prisoner on the operation of the sub before launch, and that’s definitely the case in the game. The only thing you see is the interior of the tiny sub you’ve been welded into, and the low-resolution pictures you can take from within. But you’ll never actually see any of that. After every known star and planet in the universe has vanished, the last remnants of humanity send a prisoner, the player, to a strange moon covered in an ocean of blood in order to explore what secrets may lie beneath the surface. But how do you simulate that feeling while only giving the player a small, room-sized space to play in? That’s the exact challenge David Szymanski, developer of the throwback FPS Dusk, undertakes in Iron Lung. Video games often give you the chance to explore a vast and wondrous landscape, bringing you to beautiful and horrifying sights. ![]()
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