Iron Lung dev weirded-out by their game being linked to the Titanic sub story and sales spiking: 'This feels so wrong'

pcgamer.com:

Global news this week has been fixated on the missing Titan submersible, with rescue teams racing against time to find a vessel containing five people that has gone missing during a tourist dive to the wreck of the Titanic. It is a story that in some ways is made for 24-hour rolling news coverage, with the fatalistic ticking of the clock on the craft's oxygen underpinning constant updates that all amount to the same thing: They haven't found it yet.

One notable element in the reaction on social media has been frequent comparisons to a breakout indie hit from 2022, Iron Lung, to the extent it became a Twitter trend. In this game you play the sole crewmember of the titular craft, navigating an alien seafloor with analogue instruments and a black-and-white camera on the sub's exterior, while something stirs outside. The game sets out to horrify and, helped enormously by the confines and limitations of the sub itself, is a terrifying experience.

Some of the references are simply mind-boggled comparisons to the game's premise, and how similar it is to elements of what's been going on with the Titan and the nature of the craft (such as Titan's occupants reportedly being bolted-in from the outside and unable to open the craft from inside). Others are black humour, such as one tweet I saw saying «new Iron Lung teaser lookin' sick» with a link to how much oxygen the craft is estimated to have remaining. Others point out that both craft can be piloted using a game controller (the Titan craft apparently uses a Logitech pad in its setup).

The game's developer David Szymanski has clearly seen some of this stuff, and seems to feel as weird about it as you might expect.

«I definitely see the dark humor in this whole Titanic sub thing,»