Iron Lung genuinely surprised and terrified me for all the right reasons. It feels so meticulously crafted to immerse you into this terrifying expanse and constantly makes it known that you ARE gonna die in this place. You just never know how.
Probably the biggest strengths this game has are related to the ambience. Graphically speaking it is impressive in how opressive it manages to make its low poly, pixel texture artstyle. I do not suffer from claustrophobia IRL, but it FEELS claustrophobic as hell, and I actually started hyperventilating a bit by the end. This is aided by tremendously strong audio design. Iron Lung doesn't really have much of a soundtrack, but every audio queue you hear is built meticulously to immerse you fully and, again, feels tremendously opressive. Just the random noises made by the sub or the creaking of the metal are enough to fully make you paranoid.
The gameplay style is very simple, but effective. You navigate a sub while completely blind to what's outside it with the goal of photographing a few areas of interest. You have a few tools at your disposal to accomplish your mission, primarily a map and the camera sensor at the front of your sub, as well as the controls for the sub itself which are simple buttons that allow rotation and movement forward and backward. The front of the sub also includes a radar that indicates how close you are to hitting something in the four cardinal directions (which means it intuitively works as somewhat of compass rose) and numbered indicators for your location coordinates in terms of X,Y and the angle at which your sub is facing. While confusing at first, I ended up really enjoying the navigation with the sub like this. Once I grasped the basics, it lead to a very intuitive experience where I was constantly checking the map to calculate roughly where I was and what adjustments I needed to do to get to my objective. It was not hard to adapt at all and the game is fairly generous in how it handles movement.
There's not much in terms of story content on the surface with the game, you get told a quick blurb to explain your situation at the beginning and end of the game and if you just wanna get from point A to point B, that is pretty much all you're gonna get. There is a computer terminal in your sub though and by asking it about some of the common terms you hear in the blurbs of text, it gives you a bit more context into what I was shocked to see is a decently bigger world than what the small sub would lead you to believe. There still isn't much, but it does bring this sort of existential dread to the story that helps out. However, the story is very much the weakest point in the game simply for how out of the way it is. I hope that the movie gets to expand upon that exponentially.
To finalize everything, Iron Lung is a tremendous experience. It's short and wonderful and made me enjoy every second of it. I technically haven't completed it as I am still missing one achievement, but I will be coming back to finish that up soon. I just need a bit of time to decompress after that.
Probably the biggest strengths this game has are related to the ambience. Graphically speaking it is impressive in how opressive it manages to make its low poly, pixel texture artstyle. I do not suffer from claustrophobia IRL, but it FEELS claustrophobic as hell, and I actually started hyperventilating a bit by the end. This is aided by tremendously strong audio design. Iron Lung doesn't really have much of a soundtrack, but every audio queue you hear is built meticulously to immerse you fully and, again, feels tremendously opressive. Just the random noises made by the sub or the creaking of the metal are enough to fully make you paranoid.
The gameplay style is very simple, but effective. You navigate a sub while completely blind to what's outside it with the goal of photographing a few areas of interest. You have a few tools at your disposal to accomplish your mission, primarily a map and the camera sensor at the front of your sub, as well as the controls for the sub itself which are simple buttons that allow rotation and movement forward and backward. The front of the sub also includes a radar that indicates how close you are to hitting something in the four cardinal directions (which means it intuitively works as somewhat of compass rose) and numbered indicators for your location coordinates in terms of X,Y and the angle at which your sub is facing. While confusing at first, I ended up really enjoying the navigation with the sub like this. Once I grasped the basics, it lead to a very intuitive experience where I was constantly checking the map to calculate roughly where I was and what adjustments I needed to do to get to my objective. It was not hard to adapt at all and the game is fairly generous in how it handles movement.
There's not much in terms of story content on the surface with the game, you get told a quick blurb to explain your situation at the beginning and end of the game and if you just wanna get from point A to point B, that is pretty much all you're gonna get. There is a computer terminal in your sub though and by asking it about some of the common terms you hear in the blurbs of text, it gives you a bit more context into what I was shocked to see is a decently bigger world than what the small sub would lead you to believe. There still isn't much, but it does bring this sort of existential dread to the story that helps out. However, the story is very much the weakest point in the game simply for how out of the way it is. I hope that the movie gets to expand upon that exponentially.
To finalize everything, Iron Lung is a tremendous experience. It's short and wonderful and made me enjoy every second of it. I technically haven't completed it as I am still missing one achievement, but I will be coming back to finish that up soon. I just need a bit of time to decompress after that.