Reviews
[Review] A Descent into an Ocean of Blood Makes ‘Iron Lung’ an Oppressively Atmospheric Experience
Video games often give you the chance to explore a vast and wondrous landscape, bringing you to beautiful and horrifying sights. But how do you simulate that feeling while only giving the player a small, room-sized space to play in? That’s the exact challenge David Szymanski, developer of the throwback FPS Dusk, undertakes in Iron Lung. After every known star and planet in the universe has vanished, the last remnants of humanity send a prisoner, the player, to a strange moon covered in an ocean of blood in order to explore what secrets may lie beneath the surface. But you’ll never actually see any of that. The only thing you see is the interior of the tiny sub you’ve been welded into, and the low-resolution pictures you can take from within.
The intro text states that there’s no time to train the prisoner on the operation of the sub before launch, and that’s definitely the case in the game. Part of the early game fun is figuring out what you are supposed to do and how to move the submarine around without being able to see the outside world. Your porthole has been welded shut due to the mounting pressure at your depths, so your only way of knowing where you are is a set of coordinates and a map of the ocean floor. The only two points of interaction in your sub are a control panel in the front to steer, and a big button in the back that takes a photo for you to examine the outside world on a grainy screen.
So much of this is a very tactile and crunchy experience. You have to physically walk around the cramped space to press the various buttons rather than just doing it through some slicker user interface. There’s a delay between hitting the camera button and the image popping up, almost like a dot matrix printer putting together this grainy, black and white image of the ocean floor. Having the player walk around forces you to confront the claustrophobia of your situation, immediately setting a tense atmosphere, and the clunkiness of the technology makes it feel that much more dangerous and desperate of a mission.
The minimalist gameplay here may seem limiting to some, but it’s one of the game’s smartest design decisions. There’s a simple tension that comes from blindly navigating your sub, constantly looking at the map to try to figure out what you are to make sure you don’t crash your sub. It’s a finicky process, but focusing on minutiae does a great job of lulling you into a rhythm and keeping you from bracing yourself for surprises. Short horror games often have a habit of devolving into jump scares, but Iron Lung keeps your brain busy with numbers and course adjustments just enough that it can sneak up on you. The game is also at its best when it’s making you question the rules it has set up. There are moments where you’re looking at the map and you feel like you shouldn’t be close to a wall, but for some reason, your motion sensor starts beeping at you. Do you have your calculations wrong, or could it be something else?
Even more so than most horror games, Iron Lung builds tension through exceptional sound design. Right off the bat, there’s some increasingly garbled dialog from whoever is sending you on this mission that slowly breaks down as you reach critical depth. The sounds of the ocean around you range from mundane to worrying as you begin to suspect there are creatures out there that you have no way of seeing. Audio cues clue you into the breakdown of your sub as it continues to fall apart in the pressure. The droning score, which Szymanski says was inspired
by the work of Doom 64 composer Aubrey Hodges, is minimal, but subtly emphasizes key events. Every bit of the soundscape succeeds in enhancing an already wonderful atmosphere.
The tiny playspace is rendered in chunky polygons with low fidelity textures, in the best possible way. The blurriness of the pixels gives everything such a grimy feel, painting the rusty deathtrap your travel in, with clunky buttons and displays that barely look like enough to drive with. There was even a moment while playing where I wasn’t sure if the low-fi textures were just getting fuzzier or if my control panel was actually moving, making me question my own view of what was going on. Once again Iron Lung proves that sometimes horror games can benefit from having lower detail graphics to allow you to fill in the blanks on your own.
So many games on the market have trouble controlling their scale. Feature creep causes projects to spiral out of control and lose the core of what makes them work in the first place. Iron Lung is the opposite of that. It takes a small palette and squeezes every ounce of game out of that and ends before it wears out its welcome. Clocking in at only an hour, it draws you in, ratchets the tension, and ends with a bang. As someone who finds themselves wanting increasingly shorter experiences, this is the type of video game I carve. I generally only know Szymanski because of Dusk, and Iron Lung definitely makes me want to dive into his back catalog and try out some of his other horror shorts.
Iron Lung is out now on PC.
Movies
‘Recluse’ Review – Harrowing Haunted House Horror With Lots Of Skeletons In Its Closet [Tribeca 2026]
A haunted house story is tense, terrifying storytelling when it’s properly executed. There’s been a growing tendency in horror to blend together harrowing haunted house stories with traumatic homecomings. A family member’s illness or death triggers a return to something dark that was intentionally left behind. Recluse hits all the tropes that one expects to find in this type of horror film, yet it manages to push this story in a daring, disturbing new direction that uses sound as a superpower.
It’s a unique lens to experience a familiar story about family secrets, generational trauma, unresolved grief, and the importance of not just legacy, but preservation. It’s a hell of a directorial debut from Henry Chaisson that’s guaranteed to get under the audience’s skin as they’re dragged through this painful, toxic tale.
Recluse is a gothic haunted house story where an isolated audio engineer, Joan (Sasha Frolova), returns to her family’s estate to check in on her father after he suffers a terrible accident. Joan suddenly discovers something much more sinister that paints her family’s tragedies in a very different light. Chaisson’s debut functions as a fascinating companion piece to this year’s undertone, which does a lot of the same things.
These two films make for a fascinating case of parallel thinking that tackles comparable subject matter through a similar lens, albeit in a bigger, less claustrophobic story in Recluse’s case. In fact, it’s the perfect horror film for anyone who was let down by undertone and didn’t feel like it brought enough to the table. It’s a considerably more conventional horror film, but this isn’t meant to denigrate its high quality. Recluse may hit some familiar notes, but it’s a scary, well-crafted haunted house horror story that goes for the jugular.
A gripping mystery that involves the tragic, unresolved circumstances that surround Joan’s mother teases a chilling connection to the recent horrors that have afflicted her father. Joan desperately tries to put these pieces together and give her family some sense of grander peace before she’s pulled under and becomes another victim of this festering curse that’s systematically worked its way through the Wyatt family. By doing so, Recluse digs into some deeper commentary on collective trauma, a very literal look at the “sins of the father” adage, and how one selfish decision can ripple through generations and fracture off into different dilemmas. By the end, Recluse has brilliantly flipped the powerful concept of legacy on its head by illustrating the horrors and sense of entitlement that can be born out of this idea.
A legacy is just another name for a curse under the right context.
”Listen” is a simple but powerful command from Joan’s father that she briefly obsesses over. In a way, it becomes Recluse’s grander mission statement, whether it’s in response to Joan listening to the people in her life, the signals that her body and mind are telling her, or the world’s greater whims. It’s important to reconnect with these grounding pillars, especially when it feels like control is slipping away.
Recluse excels with how audio and soundscapes can create entire universes that are full of rich details that transport individuals to these environments. There’s also a level of objectivity when it comes to audio recordings and the evergreen permanence that they’re able to provide. Joan’s career as an audio engineer makes sense for someone who wants to cling to hard evidence and proof of existence. It provides great insight into Joan without ever getting lost in contrived exposition.
Joan’s entire life is built around audio engineering, and so it makes sense that Recluse features excellent sound design that really goes above and beyond with its production elements. All of the sound design is expertly handled and turns the film into something special. These auditory elements intuitively keep the audience on edge so that they’re more susceptible to the actual scares that eventually strike. The smallest sound effect gets turned into a crushing, cacophonous assault. It’s a really effective way to build terror. Writer/Director Chaisson also handles the film’s music, which achieves a sublime, unnerving dissonance that further heightens the free-floating anxiety.
The story at the center of Recluse is slightly generic in some respects, but the film’s visual language and tone make it feel distinctly memorable. It also doesn’t hurt that the home that Joan returns to is basically an eerie art studio that’s full of contorted paintings. Recluse never struggles to generate mounting dread and terror that pump through every scene. Powerful, thoughtful cinematography consistently reinforces the film’s themes. Joan is constantly reflected in different surfaces or viewed through mirrors. She’s also often confined to tight, constricting framing that all speaks to her refracted identity during this moment of loss and her attempts to regain agency and control by making sense of something that’s seemingly unexplainable.
Recluse is full of truly disturbing visuals that make it seem like Joan is lost in a dream that turns out to be an extended nightmare. It’s a surreal journey reminiscent of invasive psychological horror like Silent Hill, with a touch of Sinister and Hereditary thrown in for good measure. There are so many individual frames that could endlessly fuel urban legends and creepypastas.
It does a great job with how it presents Joan’s fragile state of mind, where chilling flashes of the past sneak up on her and unresolved trauma manifests into unsettling imagery. There are endless shots that are obscured in darkness, or shadow is creeping in from the corners of frames like a suffocating force of nature. It’s very rare that a scene is fully lit. It leads to a very lonely, isolating atmosphere that’s easy to get lost in.
Chaisson’s debut stands out from the many other high-minded haunted house horror films without succumbing to the same pretensions that often drag down these stories. It’s a grief-stricken character study that’s full of upsetting visuals that scratch at something visceral and raw. The horror elements connect, and the answers to its grander mystery provide an appropriate and believable sense of closure. Those who are looking for an atmospheric horror film that isn’t afraid to be different while still channeling something real will appreciate Recluse.
Recluse made its world premiere at Tribeca; release info TBD.
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