Gaming: I Watched Markiplier Play Iron Lung For 45 Minutes Before Watching...

I sealed myself in and plunged into Markiplier's world.

Another week, another videogame adaptation hits the movie theaters—but this one is a bit different. YouTuber Markiplier (Mark Fischbach) produced, directed, acted in, and even distributed an adaptation of indie horror game Iron Lung, which he first recorded himself playing in 2022.

But which is better, watching Markiplier play the game for 45 minutes on YouTube or watching the 2+ hour adaptation he directs and stars in? I decided to watch both yesterday—including a follow-up video where he spent 30 minutes replaying Iron Lung—meaning I submerged myself in more than three entire hours of Markiplier in a single day.

No, I'm not a hero, I'd just rather stare at a screen than do any real work.

Iron Lung, if you haven't played it yourself, is a first-person horror sim where you're sealed inside a tiny submarine and submerged in an ocean of blood on an alien planet. Using minimalist controls, you steer your windowless sub around taking pictures of whatever is lurking in the bloody depths while getting progressively more scared and paranoid. It's a great game.

It's also a short game, perfect for a single sitting: Markiplier's YouTube playthrough is only about 45 minutes long, though there are a few edits and time-skips in his video. We watch as he learns how to operate the tiny sub's controls, figures out how to navigate to marked locations on a map, and positions the sub to take photos of what he finds. And of course, he gets the crap scared out of him more than a few times.

As you might expect at the bottom of an ocean of blood on an alien planet, it's spooky as hell down there, and it's a lot of fun watching Markiplier react to the various alarming sounds and events as the sense of dread grows and grows. I enjoyed his playthrough, as well as the 30-minute follow-up video after a patch added a boatload of lore to the submarine sim. If you don't like playing horror games yourself, this is a pretty good way to experience Iron Lung.

So… how was the Iron Lung movie? Well, I can't be as straightforward about Markiplier's film as I can about his YouTube videos. There's plenty of good stuff in the movie, most of it in the first hour, but also plenty of problems, especially toward the end.

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One thing Markiplier's film does well is expand on the submarine itself. The controls, readouts, layout are all delight

Source: PC Gamer