Voyager-19 |

Published: Deep Root Interactive

Developer: Deep Root Interactive

Release Date: 05/19/2024

Available Exclusively On

I have yet to play Iron Lung, but I know it created a whole new genre of horror games set around claustrophobic spaces and minimal visuals. The PS1-inspired graphics are not much to look at, sadly. The cockpit you are in is almost non-existent, with only some hoses and a monitor. The plot revolves around the disappearance of a spacecraft, and you embark on a 30-to-60 year journey on Voyager-19 to unravel the mystery. The only gameplay is clicking around on buttons on the monitor with various creepy sound effects playing around you. The game is deceptively unnerving and, sadly, doesn’t capitalize on anything that adds up to much.

You have to maintain a certain level of power. You must keep life support on at all times, but you also have power for your camera, radio, navigation system, and thrusters. You have to complete seven missions to finish the game, and these are all exactly the same. Photograph various planets on their lit sides, and record five seconds of radio. On the navigation screen, you will see large orbs, which are suns, and small orbs, which are planets. You’ve got to move your ship to the left, but you can turn while in camera mode to face the planet and adjust. This necessitates the use of thrusters. Once you snap the photo, you record your radio piece, which can be the haunting sounds of planets, and move on.

After each mission, you wake up from hibernation and need to complete the next one. The screen becomes harder to read (in a not-so-fun way, I might mention), and you lose more and more power. This is when the game gets very tedious. The last couple of missions only give you two power bars, so you constantly have to flip around menus, turning things off and on. Occasionally, you may encounter objects in space, yet the game fails to provide further details or allow you to investigate their nature. The game’s limitations shouldn’t constantly leave the player wondering if something interesting will happen, especially when almost nothing ever does.

The game has a lot of potential. Perhaps the game could benefit from varying the missions and providing us with more background information. You have to decrypt a file after every mission, but towards the end, the screen is so hard to read that most people may actually not be able to complete it. There’s too much distortion and effects layered over to make it enjoyable. I liked the atmosphere up until there was no pay-off. I yearned for more reading, seeing, and especially hearing, as these are the primary senses in this type of game. Overall, Voyager-19 will kill an hour of your time if you want an Iron Lung-style adventure, but even for the low price, the game just doesn’t pay off much.