IRON NEST: the dieselpunk of Iron Harvest, except here you command nothing at all, you are sitting inside the turret

First reaction to the IRON NEST banner: this smells like Iron Harvest. The same imagination of oversized war machines, the same interwar Europe run on diesel, the same silhouette of a colossus crushing a stretch of countryside. KING Art's RTS, drawn from Jakub Rozalski's 1920+ paintings, was a game we liked a lot, and clearly we are not the only ones who still remember it.

Except IRON NEST is not playing in that category at all, and that is where it gets interesting. In Iron Harvest you commanded armies from above, in strategic view, with a general's comfort. Here you are one man, shut inside a turret, and you will never see the battlefield in any way other than through numbers and aerial photographs. The point of view has flipped a hundred and eighty degrees: you are no longer the one deciding the war, you are the one who pulls.

Two guys and a gun

The game is by Nick Nieuwoudt and Dominik Latos, which is to say exactly two people, self-publishing on Steam and GOG. A passion project fed on an obsession with artillery and interwar machinery, and one that made far more noise than its size suggested: IRON NEST finished first in wishlist additions at the June Steam Next Fest, and second demo of the festival by unique players. For a first-person turret simulator, let us admit that was not a foregone conclusion.

What your ten fingers actually do

The operator's job comes down to a loop that looks simple on paper and is not. Two teleprinters chatter continuously: one relays top-priority directives from High Command, the other direct calls from the front line. It is on you to turn that stream of contradictory information into a firing plan.

After that, everything runs through your hands. You take measurements on the map from the coordinates you received, grind the numbers through the ballistic calculator until a firing solution appears, choose the propellant charge (heavier to throw the shell to the horizon, lighter to arc it down into an enemy emplacement), crank the elevation wheel, lay the gun, fire. Then you wait for the aerial reconnaissance photos to find out what you actually hit.

The choice of shell is not cosmetic either: armour-piercing to open a bunker, smoke to screen a friendly withdrawal. And other options, let us say, less presentable. The game also warns that the machine may fail. You may not.

It is that procedural slowness, turned into tension, that won over the demo's players: 99 percent positive across more than 4,000 reviews, which remains a rare score for a proposition this austere.

The part that makes you uncomfortable

This is where the Iron Harvest comparison stops dead. The 2020 RTS was a handsome war of miniatures, spectacular and legible. IRON NEST puts guilt at the centre and refuses to dilute it. The store page goes as far as redacting its own sentences when it touches on gas, and states flatly that neither spotless paperwork nor the finest propaganda will erase your fault. The line that best sums up the mood: it never happened if there are no witnesses.

You can move the markers on the map, but the scars remain. Translation: a game where you never see your victims, and where it is precisely the absence of an image that creates the unease. High Command issues the orders, but it does not carry the consequences. That is your finger on the lever.

The missing tutorial

Two things, and they come up consistently in player feedback. The first is guidance: the game throws its measurements, charges and calculator at you without holding your hand much, and the lack of a tutorial has been the most frequent complaint. The entry curve is steep, deliberately so, but it will leave people by the roadside.

The second is the narrowness of the proposition. An artillery simulator made of measurements, calculations and waiting is a niche game, still rough around the edges in places, and it will not convert anyone who is not already curious about the subject. Those players will be bored stiff.

For everyone else, it is a singular and frankly gutsy success. Two people took a blind spot of the war game, carried it all the way to moral nausea, and pulled a mechanical experience out of it that exists nowhere else. We wanted more dieselpunk after Iron Harvest; we did not expect it to come back through the sighting hole, with dirty hands.