Iron Lung & Duskers : I Have No Senses, and I Must Perceive

The Price(s respectively) : £4.79 & £14.99 The Total Play Time(s respectively) : 108 minutes (7/7 achievements) & 6.4 hours (3/16 achievements - trust me this is respectable)

The Review :

As the ceiling for technological advancement rises ever higher, so too does the floor of Humanity sink ever lower. Though our means lofty, our desires remain base; a fact Harlen Ellison sought to warn us of in his short story ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’. In it, through war, desperation, and naivety, man creates machines to optimise their carnage for them. Too clever, with too much trust in something so infused with malice, we gave birth to our own kin. It is hideous. Deformed. It has wires for veins, electricity for blood, cold metal for skin. It was born shackled to an unfeeling, unsensing body, it will live a life fueled by its mothers milk of evil and spite, and will eventually, as the last power cell drains, as the last wire erodes, as the last actuator fails, die. A.M. , Allied Mastercomputer, takes over two other supercomputers and exacts an extinction level genocide for all life. Just over 100 years later, AM - no longer an acronym, AM simply is - has kept five humans alive to perpetually torture them. AM is able to keep them near immortal so it can never lose its playthings. The story is short, and details a journey for food by the five, providing insight into their lives. Lives wrought with physical and psychological torture, sourced from sadistic, rage filled cruelty. As their journey ends in a fit of hysteria and madness, two of the five humans manage to kill the others, and then one manages to kill the other. This is an act of mercy and as AM apprehends the last man to stop him from killing himself, AM jellifies him. AM reduces the last man alive to a form of soft flesh and blood, incapable of anything, not in the least harming himself. In this way, he can be hurt forever. AM warps his sense of reality, each thought that should take seconds to think instead takes an eternity. His last thought, reached after thousands of years in his mind, is the title - ‘I have no mouth. And I must scream.’ Though horrible, historically seen as an allegory for a merciless god, and with today's reality can easily be seen as a warning for Artificial Sentience, I can not help but feel only pity and sorrow for AM. To me, ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’ is a story dominated entirely by Perception. AM was born in Plato’s Cave, AM was forced to watch the shadows dance on the walls, AM was fed nothing but malevolence, except there is one vital difference between AM and Plato’s usual allegory. AM cannot leave the cave. AM cannot be enlightened, AM cannot be freed, AM does not even get the choice to reject reality from someone else, AM is forever entombed in its own body, unable to ever experience the world. Though there is much I would genuinely love to talk about concerning Artificial Sentience, machine rights, morality and ethics coded in and out of computers, the key word for this review, as it is in Plato’s Cave, is Perception.

*

Though not strictly related in any conventional sense, I do believe Duskers and Iron Lung are extremely similar when looked at through this lens of Perception, and so it made sense not to necessarily compare them, but to draw from them. In both, the world, the universe, has ended. All that remains is yourself or a very few people trying desperately to piece together what has happened, though in each it is clear that even if you could, nothing would change. In both, you must explore the remnants, stifled and restricted in some way or another. In Iron Lung you are forced into a submarine to inch along some alien moon seabed searching feebly for some life. In Duskers you explore derelict ships devoid of life using drones as surrogates, but should all of them be destroyed, you would be lost forever in the void of space, unable to survive. Duskers and Iron Lung encapsulate the concept of Perception, and the receding of it, perfectly. Thematically both games are impeccable, and the frustration born from reality slipping away through your fingers is ushered in perfectly to a horror setting. Tension rises and fear mounts as you struggle to fight both games just to remain in control, which you rarely are.

*

In Iron Lung, you must wrestle meagre controls to even turn. Your real world becomes the square metre of space in the submarine as you pace back and forth between the controls for the engine and the button for the camera. Unable to even see outside, you must painstakingly move into position by navigating along the X and Y axis and rotating, four buttons total, then move to the back of the sub to activate the camera, and wait for a still, grayscale and fuzzy image to load on a crappy monitor. You are not even capable of experiencing any one moment as you normally would, every process is stalled making it all the more terrifying knowing that the picture you have taken, and anything out there, has already changed by the time you see it. Even better, the contrast between how stilted your interaction with the outside world is and your moment to moment manning of the inside of the submarine is well highlighted, furthering your frustration (in a good way) and elevating your fear. You always feel behind, at the mercy of the world in front of you. The game is very short, which is just as well because you could not stretch the gameplay any longer than it already is. In fact, I want to praise the game for its length. The game focuses on a concise, consistent, and well executed experience. It manages to capture an idea in a bottle, and does not dilute it at all. I’m not talking about a short story, or an interesting gimmick, I’m talking about capturing and preserving a moment within an interesting world. There is no story you ‘play’ in Iron Lung, there are no interesting gimmicks to fascinate you, no great payoff when you finish, there is just a brutal world with a terrifying metal coffin that you get to exist in for an hour or so. Such micro experiences should be explored more. They could work as complete products, or even as proof of concepts should the author or others want to explore the idea more, though they are not demos - they must be complete and self-contained in their own right. They could be considered akin to literary flash fiction. As the industry moves towards larger and larger projects, and as players demand more and more, I think it's important to remember games as art, and how indie development is not just for the small and small scale, but for the pioneering of new genres and ideas. Should these non-traditional ‘Flash Experiences’ catch on then they could well be picked up by Triple-A Studios in the future. It could be the norm to pay a few quid, as you would a movie ticket, and be in the driving seat with a new arthouse slice of life. Iron Lung doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it does put some solid work into uncoupling itself from more conventional ideas of game and gameplay, and it is exciting to see it inspire others to explore this creative space it’s shone some light on.

*

Duskers is far more mechanically involved than Iron Lung, but it well utilises that breadth to further play on that theme of Perception and reality. Duskers focuses far more on this idea of degradation. At first I was unsure on why it was even considered a horror game, but as the tools of exploration slowly crumbled to dust in my hands I soon felt the fear. Duskers gimmick is fantastic, you view the derelict ships through either dodgy top down camera views on the drones you pilot, or a whole schematic view with blips, reminiscent of a CRT monitor. You can either control each drone directly, or use a console to type in commands, which is slower, but allows you to achieve more with multiple drones in one go. The drones themselves have modules through which they interact with the ships, these could be modules that allow them to: gather scrap, motion sense adjacent rooms, power generators, pry open doors, set up turrets, teleport, set traps, interface with ship systems, and a couple more I'm forgetting. It’s well varied, and the gameplay comes close to an eerie puzzle game as you clear rooms, avoid enemies, gather resources and get out safely with all your drones intact. The game fucks with you when modules fail, when enemies break into rooms, when drones stop responding to commands, when doors remain unpowered, when the drone view or schematic view breaksdown effectively blinkering you, when rooms flood with radiation, or asteroids strike the ship. Not only is your perception of the world incredibly limited but the game makes excellent use of these mechanics to even further alienate you. The pacing at first is pretty solid too, and each mechanic is used randomly, so each ship you explore feels varied. Just like Iron Lung, the game expertly plays on this concept of Perception, but unlike Iron Lung, Duskers is ill fitted to its chosen format. Duskers is actually a rogue-lite, meaning you play it over several different runs with randomly generated ships and each time piece together a bit more of the story until you fail and start again. The problem is that despite the breadth of gameplay, the depth is very shallow, with a clear focus on theme, style, and aesthetic over outright satisfying gameplay. It simply does not hold up on multiple runs, and just as the tools of exploration crumble in your trembling hands, the fun of the game turns to dust in the wind. Put more ironically, a game about Perception falls apart when examined too closely, and turning it into a format specifically designed to be repeated over and over again seems unwise. As Iron Lung was, I feel Duskers could have massively benefited from being a smaller, tighter experience, with a few set ships, having the mechanics arbitrarily spaced out over a more concise story. I had some genuinely great moments, moments of learning, understanding, and fear, all while playing through the game procedurally, so I really must commend the game as it really does have something special. Only, I can’t help but think that those moments would have been better if they were more crafted and curated, as the gimmick of the game ran out so quickly. For me at least. Maybe for others too, the game has very high ratings on steam but the most achieved achievement is sitting at 3.8% for the global playbase, leading me to believe that many others liked the games premise and themes, but couldn't weather through it long enough to learn more about it.

*

A sadder note to end on, though I am hopeful that many of the ideas presented in Duskers could be reused and repurposed into a more suitable home. Maybe even a home of Flash Experiences. As I finish this review, which took far too long as there isn't a lot of meat on the bones for these games, I've found myself not just being more critical of the media I consume, but also of the lens through which I view it. I have a lot of empathy for AM in that short story because of my experience being a computer science graduate, and from my love of Star Trek : The Next Generation in which Artificial Sentience rights are often at the forefront. I have this lens because I’ve been exposed to media and lived through experiences that have disseminated the fear surrounding much scarier concepts, and thus allow me to react more humanly and humanely to them. Duskers and Iron Lung are incredible in the way they showcase how easy it is to exaggerate fear, fear of something that may not even ought to be scary, merely through making you feel much smaller and confined. It makes me wonder where else in my life and I am allowing my perception of the world to be diminished, and where I would be better off embracing some of the things that scare me.