The Delicious Terror of Iron Lung

The other night I played Iron Lung, the short horror game about being in a spooky little submarine that Markiplier ended up making a movie adaptation of, and man, I did love it.

There is a clear inherent freakiness to the ocean. I haven't played other notable spooky ocean games, but I certainly see the appeal. You can't see what's going on, even if you can get a glimpse into your surroundings. Everything is so, so dark, and covered in disgusting barnacles and things. The fish down there look gloopy and strange (I really like the varieties of deep sea creature we know about, really, but they are often gloopy mode). There is a great, vast, impossible world down there.

This game takes that beautiful darkness and injects a wonderful sci-fi nastiness to it. Not only are you desperately surveying weird stuff in a creepy alien ocean in the far future, but you're doing it in a uniquely dismal political situation - you're a prisoner put to work recording the vestiges of cosmic life, a task that will surely kill you. In an ocean of blood, by the way.

The gameplay itself is a bit tedious, but once you get invested, this too adds to the experience. You are experiencing the perfect tedium and anxiety of a fraught, dangerous job that you're doing against your will. You photograph confusing, unclear biological structures scattered around like wreckages, and you hear apparent signs of life surrounding your horrible, rotten vehicle. I was sweating with nervous anticipation through it all.

The game is short and mechanically simple, but there is a lingering beauty to the tension, to the dark slivers of a cursed and ruined world it presents. Finishing it was bliss. I must now, of course, seek out Markiplier's vision.