Iron Lung is a small $6 horror indie game title developed by David Szymanski where the player is at the controls of a small one-man submarine on an alien moon. The game features a minimalistic feeling, making the game more immersive, and dreadful. Your only way of navigation though is a camera lens, an incomplete satalite map, and sensors. These features and setting of Iron Lung is intended to build dread and paranoia, by limiting the options to see what’s around you.
The gameplay is quite simple: navigate through this ocean of blood, taking photos of specific locations. Seems simple enough, minus the deadly and dangerous creatures that must avoid if you want to survive. According to Iron Lung’s Steam page, the story is basically every know star, inhabitable or not, vanishes and the only inhabitants left are ones stationed in space. Supplies run thin and in search of resources, a mysterious “Blood Ocean” anomaly appears with useful resources after scans. The description goes on to say, “…you’re the unlucky sap who gets to investigate, in an aging submarine cobbled together from rusty space station parts. Find your way to the marked locations, photograph whatever you find there, and try to finish before the sub collapses around you… or you’re discovered by whatever lurks in the blood…” It wasn’t up until recently that the sub-themed horror indie title suddenly spiked in sales due to a notical catastrophe with recent reviews making similarities to the disaster.
Over the past week, “Titan” the OceanGate submersiable vessel, lost contact with the home vessel while making a trip down with five onboard to the RMS Titanic, a British Ocean Liner that sank more than 111 years ago on a maiden voyage. From a USA Today article, “The Coast Guard confirmed Thursday (June 23rd) that debris located near Titanic wreck site came from missing submersible Titan, making it clear that the five passengers on board died from “ catastrophic implosion.”
During that week of the event, Szymanski posted a tweet with a screenshot of Iron Lung sales, saying “This feels so wrong…” which spiked between Monday (June 19th) and Tuesday (June 20th). Syzmanshki later comments in a tweet “I definitely see the dark humor in this whole Titanic sub thing, it’s just… like, I made Iron Lung the most nightmarish thing I could think of, and knowing real people are in that situation right now is pretty horrific, even if it was their own bad decisions...Like all the jokes I’ve been seeing are hilarious but also good lord nobody should have to die like that.”
Szymanski later leaves a tweet, calling out news outlets, specifically the comments replying with a gif of a man wiping his tears with money, claiming the indie developer is profiting from the event, hammering home the point of lack of sympathy users have.
Currently, the player count on SteamDB has also peaked today and is remaining consistent. As for the recent reviews on Steam, the majority are making references to the Titan submersible, with one reviewer, oldtv964 saying, “best experienced with Logitech f710 wireless gamepad” which was the game controller that the Titan was using at the time. Due to this, Logitech stock dropped due to their controller being used on the submersible.