'Iron Lung' Is a Terrifying Horror Game About Your Inevitable Demise

I am in a ship that is also an execution. It is called the Iron lung. And I am not alone in this empty blood ocean.

I know I am not alone, because Iron Lung, the latest from boomer-shooter master David Szymanski, is a horror game set in a blood ocean, and it would be strange to be alone in a blood ocean. It is one of the most terrifying games I have ever played. If you have an hour, and enjoy horror, go play the game—and then come back to this piece.

Szymanski, despite being best known for his extremely frenetic shooter, DUSK, is no stranger to slow burn, high tension, and mechanically simple horror. His previous games, Fingerbones, A Wolf in Autumn, The Moon Silver, and The Music Machine, all rely on extremely simple mechanics ranging from simple traversal to password entry and puzzle-solving—Iron Lung is no different.

Set in an ocean of blood on an alien moon in the wake of the “Quiet Rapture," an event which saw the disappearance of every lifeform in the universe with the exception of people living on autonomous space stations, Iron Lung focuses on a convict who has been sent to investigate the blood ocean in a submarine. The ship is not built for this depth, and it will almost certainly break underneath the pressure. To prevent an early collapse, the ship’s only window has been barricaded, and you are forced to navigate by sensors alone, aided by an exterior, single shot camera. Your goal is to photograph several points of interest before your ship implodes.

You navigate the ocean by adjusting your bearing, and forward velocity via a simple interface. You press the right button on your console to turn right, and the left button to turn left. You press the forward button to go forward, and the backward facing button to go backwards. It is simple, and slow. Your camera is controlled by a button at the back of your ship. To see where you are going you have to turn around and walk away from your controls. This means that, when you hear a thud outside your ship, there is a significant delay between the sound and your ability to take a photo of what made that noise. The photographs take a moment to develop and the delay makes me sick, because you are not alone in the craters of this impossibly alive, alien moon.

There are bones here too, around my execution-ship. I am curious if they experience nostalgia from feeling the deep red-wet, if the crushing weight of plasma above reminds them of the pressure and pull of taut muscle and meat. I am wondering if the bones are happy, or comfortable here. I am wondering how they, unlike my ship, do not creak under the burden of a wounded planet. 

Szymanski’s use of sound design to build tension is masterful. Your ship is thick with the noise of the ocean: the thud of cave walls (and other things), alien thrums, and the sound of blood (thick) moving around your ship. It is also filled with its own sounds, too. The radar pings slowly as you approach a tunnel, and then all at once it blinks and cries from every direction. When it begins to crack from the weight of blood above, pressure gauges and the ship’s own pneumatic circulatory system begin to scream. When the camera clicks, there is a moment of delay filled with the mechanical noise of a physical camera. It feels like the ship is breathing, preparing itself to open its eyes and show you the horrible nothing outside. The ship is as alive as you and as alive as the moon and is, as many alive things are, very afraid.

And it is right to be afraid. Not only because of the immense pressure and the strange things which break against its hull, but also because its pilot is a poor and unprepared steward. The game’s opening narration states that you were sealed into this ship without any training as to its operation. You are expected to die, which is why the ship’s previous tenant refers to it as an execution in a note you can find on the floor. Both the player, and the character they are embodying, are expected to flounder in this tomb. 

Slamming the Iron Lung into cave walls, and uncertainly approaching the lonely bones which sit dormant in the sanguine silt and murk, is expected of both the player and their character. It is an act of arbitrary and immense cruelty visited upon both you and your ship. You become each other’s executioners. The ship through its susceptibility to pressure and falling oxygen, and you through the high-cost human error of piloting a ship like this.

And now, I am smelling burning. But I disregard it for the map, which I am tracing with my fingers, charting latitude and longitude because I cannot see outside of the Iron Lung, which is named for a prison that kept people almost alive, until someone turned it off.

From the first moments of the game, I was certain that I was going to die. Whether it be from a lack of oxygen, or the crushing pressure, or some impossible thing in the blood-water, didn’t actually matter. I knew I would die. Which meant the assumption of death, and horror, lurks around every corner. Every thud against the ship’s hull became colored by death. Every ruptured pneumatic pipe, a signal that my time was up. And the fucking camera.

Iron Lung asks you to take around a dozen photos accross its hour-long run-time, but most players will take more. Whether to further investigate the strange skeletons at the bottom of the blood ocean, or to simply determine how close they are to slamming, nose first, into a cave wall. Every photo feels like a threat, like this will be the one that shows the creature, terrible and alive, approaching your ship. When you hear the thud against your hull, and sprint back to the camera to catch a glimpse of the thing, you hope and dread that maybe this will finally be the shot that reveals the thing trying to kill you. You never snap the picture in time.

This sense that my demise was not only inevitable, but perpetually imminent, led to an adrenaline driven hyperfocus on the task at hand. The map, the instruments, and the ships controls became both the instruments of my progress through the game, and the method of my execution. They became singular in my mind.

One moment in particular stands out. Around halfway through the game, I navigated my way to a point of interest at the end of a long tunnel. It had been a tense few minutes, requiring precise turning through a narrow break in the moon. When I turned around to take the photo, I realized that my ship had been on fire for several minutes without me noticing. I could hear the fire, sure, but it didn’t even register. My ears were tuned to creakn and thuds and radar pings, and the sound of burning just slid off of me. I scrambled for the onboard fire extinguisher, and quickly put out the fire. My first thought was of how much oxygen I had just lost to the burning. For the rest of the game, I would periodically glance over my shoulder, afraid that the fire would take me again.

I am feeling the sticky and wet around my feet and I am startled, and then I am dead when the thing that has been hunting me decides I should be dead. I cannot understand, but wholly agree with its decision.

Your investigation, and your focus, are cruel pantomimes of an attempt at a better future. It is an inevitable failure, and an execution. It happens on a wounded moon, organized by the dying stewards of an empty universe. 

Whether it be the ship, or the moon, or the .exe which crashes when you finally, mercifully are killed by something in the dark. It 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. A thing which keeps our world barely alive, until someone turns it off.