Perhaps you recently glanced at the internet and saw the fuss about Iron Lung, the indie horror movie that got off to a rip-roaring start last week, elbowing Melania aside to take the number two spot in the US box office charts, thwarted only by horror movie king Sam Raimi’s Send Help. Iron Lung’s success can almost certainly be attributed to its links with mega-popular YouTuber Mark Edward Fischbach – better known as Markiplier – for whom the project’s clearly been a labour of love, given he not only self-funded it, but wrote it, directed it, and starred in it too. But whatever there is to be said about the movie (critical opinion is mixed), its headline-making turn has finally given me the nudge to check out the game it’s based on, having languished on my Steam wishlist for so long. And, yup, it’s a good ‘un.
Iron Lung, if you’re as late to the party as I am, is the work of developer David Szymanski, perhaps best known for the acclaimed retro horror shooter Dusk. But Szymanski’s body of work also includes a load of grimy, experimental lo-fi micro-horrors – a category Iron Lung comfortably fits within. It’s a cosmic scream of tale, set in a distant future where every habitable planet and star has vanished from existence in an event known as The Quiet Rapture. Those few humans left alive on artificial outposts in space face a desperate fight for survival as the universe’s few remaining natural resources continue to dwindle – and so begins an expedition to AT-5, a distant moon where an anomalous ocean of blood has been found.
Iron Lung is an unassuming thing. It’s unashamedly retro, for starters, built from minimalist textures and PS1-era low-poly models. It features a single, squalid location, barely an armspan wide; it lasts a brisk 45 minutes or so, and takes up a paltry 150mb of your hard drive. But don’t let that fool you; this is the kind of thick, suffocating horror that starts badly and only gets worse from there. You – an unnamed convict who’s signed up to this grim expedition in the hope of securing your freedom – begin your journey sealed into the titular Iron Lung; a dank, claustrophobic rust-bucket of a submarine, so unfit for purpose it’s been welded shut in the less-than-reassuring hope it’ll withstand the pressure of the blood ocean’s ominous depths.
At first, as you make your slow descent, your progress is accompanied by the chatter of an unseen operator, but soon the words are lost in static as you reach your cruising depth and the fore-window is closed. And as the silence sets in, the already foreboding atmosphere only grows more discomforting. It doesn’t help that your goal – and the means of achieving it – isn’t immediately clear, but after poking around the submarine’s squalid interior, and investigating the limited tools at your disposal, you’ll start to make sense of things. To the front lies a control panel, used to move your sub back and forth, and to adjust its rotation. To the rear lies an enigmatic computer terminal, a blank screen, and an glowing camera button. Your task, you’ll soon learn, is to navigate the winding trench beneath the blood ocean’s surface and photograph points of interest marked on your map – being careful to avoid slamming your fragile vehicle into the treacherous rock walls, bringing your trip to a premature end.
There’s an immediate problem though: your sub has no windows, no easy way to observe the world outside, and you’ve no navigation aids beyond a grubby paper map of the trench to refer to. That essentially means you’re piloting the sub entirely blind – intuiting your progress and approximating your position, creating a mental spatial picture, by cross-referencing the barely legible grid markings on your map with those on your ship’s display. You’re not completely cut off from the world beyond, mind. At any time you can smack the camera button at the back of your sub to snap an image of your immediate surroundings on the nearby screen – but these grungy, static-filled black and white shots are mere fragments of a vast, unknowable whole, and hint at a haunted world of darkness so oppressive it often feels better not to look at all.
And that’s pretty much Iron Lung. You examine your map and plot a mental course from one location to the next. You hit a button to adjust your sub’s angle, hit another to move forward or back (as much as the concept of movement means anything in a world you can’t see), inching through the mere suggestion of surroundings until you’re finally where you need to be. Then you do it again. And again. And again. It shouldn’t work – it should feel repetitive to the point of tedium – but in Szymanski’s skilled hands, a gloomy low-poly box and a couple of buttons become the instruments of remarkable anxiety and increasingly unbearable tension.
Much of that’s down to its sound design, of course. Early on, the interior of your sub is defined by the quiet mechanical groan of ageing machinery and the drip, drip, drip of leaking water, while the ocean outside oozes and bubbles – white noise occasionally broken by the haunting howl of something, perhaps, like whalesong. And with the whir of every rotation, the hum of the engine in motion, the urgent screech of the radar’s proximity sensors, I found myself steadily sinking deeper and deeper into Szymanski’s nightmarish illusion, never once doubting the existence of an exterior world I couldn’t see. I could picture the abyss, the treacherous rock walls closing in as unfathomably vast spaces snapped tighter – all made real through the interplay of a crudely drawn map, some stellar sound design, and my frantic imagination.
Szymanski builds the tension slowly, insidiously, establishing a rhythm and routine that demands concentration – a tunnel vision focus that, at precisely judged moments, is inevitably, harshly broken. To say much more would be to spoil the experience, of course, and this is a journey that feels worth taking. Part of me is curious to see how Szymanski’s perfectly honed 45-minute slice of intensely claustrophobic horror – a masterclass in the power of suggestion – adapts to a baggier two-hour movie where the game’s brilliant economy and unwavering focus will inevitably need to be broken. But while I doubt I’ll be rushing out to see Iron Lung at the cinema, I’m at least grateful it got Szymanski’s work back on my radar. Even if that radar, its incessant, angry beep, is almost certainly the sound of something unspeakably awful, drifting out there in the bloody depths of a forgotten moon.