When I watched Iron Lung I remarked to some friends that it might be the first film adaptation of a computer game that is longer than the original game, but when I saw Exit 8 on the programme for the annual Japanese Film Festival I realised that it got beaten to the punch by at least a year.

This inspired me to make a Letterboxd list of movies that are longer than the game they’re based on. The criterion that I’m using is the official runtime of the film version versus what How Long to Beat gives as the median clear time for the main story mode of the game. How Long to Beat uses times self-sampled from the kinds of people who log game times on How Long to Beat which will skew those times down a bit from what a typical person might experience, but it’s the best metric available for this kind of thing.

The current list isn’t terribly long but the games represented in it fall into three categories. The first is recent indie horror titles. The two games that inspired this list fall in here. Five Nights at Freddy’s, another obvious contender that a few people have already suggest to me, doesn’t make the cut. How Long to Beat has the first Five Nights at Freddy’s down as two hours, just ten minutes longer than the 2023 movie’s runtime.

The second block is fighting games. I had thought about excluding fighting games from the list both because I thought that they would probably dominate everything else and because clearing the arcade mode of the likes of Street Fighter II doesn’t really feel like a reasonable judge of the “length” of a game that is intended to be primarily multiplayer. Even so, I eventually decided to stick to the rule I set and added them.

The third category is Super Mario Bros., which I think is a bit of an arguable case as the film is not really based on the game of same name so much as a taking ideas from the broad strokes of the series as a whole¹, but I decided to include it anyway because I love that movie and I think it’s a funny addition to the list.

This review contains spoilers.

Replicates the big clunky interface from the game in a way that is comical to see a real person interacting with, but doesn’t spend that long trying to replicate the isolation or dread of the game. Far from people stranded by himself at the bottom of an ocean of blood, people won’t leave Markiplier alone. Which is a shame; I quite like the scenes that focus on him doggedly navigating the oceanbed, cut off from everyone else.

What the film does instead is to (unsurprisingly) focus on and expand the scant lore of the game into a more surreal and heroic journey for the convict forced into this suicide mission. That could work fine but a lot of it felt more like it was just trying to do creepy, surreal, horror movie stuff rather than being thematically coherent (or just coherent) at all. That said, it does mostly do creepy, surreal, horror movie stuff fairly effectively and it’s not like I wasn’t enjoying myself, though I rolled my eyes at the big heroic ending.

Despite finding the replica video game room funny I did like the X-ray camera and I do think the film generally looks quite good other than a few naff shots of the big fish and when it gets too dark to see anything that is happening.

Perfectly executed little thing. The relatively simple but non-trivial navigational task keeps one occupied enough for all the horrible little oppressive noises to slowly fray away at the nerves, keeping one primed for the bigger scares to release that built up tension. Doesn’t overstay its welcome or overexplain itself.