We're republishing it today in celebration of Spooky Season. Marathon is the kind of game where you can be creeping around a quiet, decrepit little outpost looking for a bit of unstable biomass when all of a sudden, a ventilation shaft cover bursts open and a robot pops out and stabs you to death. All those great guns you had and other upgrades and loot you’d collected on this run?
That’s also one of the biggest reasons why Marathon feels like the scariest game I’ve played in a long time. During Marathon’s February server slam, in which developer Bungie made the extraction shooter playable to the public ahead of its March 5 release, I was instantly creeped out by the loading screen where a moth chews on some kind of wire — presumably the same wiring that powers the Runner shells you play as in the game. All the loading screens and cinematics instantly make the experience feel unsettling, like you’re in some kind of glitchy futuristic nightmare.
After all, you’re investigating how 30,000 colonists somehow disappeared from the New Cascada Colony on Tau Ceti IV. What could a force capable of doing that do to my little robot as I run around scrambling for more ammo? When I first tried Marathon with my Destiny clanmates, we were more worried about enemy players than the UESC security robots patrolling the map.
We couldn’t have been more wrong. In Destiny, the vast majority of missions involve rushing through narrow corridors into the next firefight, relying on your space magic powers to crush waves of enemies. In Marathon, applying the same approach ended in disaster.
We rushed into North Relay and wiped out a few bots before one of my teammates interacted with some kind of special objective. We hunkered down, but within minutes were overwhelmed by a small army of robots led by one seemingly unkillable boss with a cape that could turn invisible. As we lay dying, the robots surrounded us and shot cabling into our bodies that sucked out our life force.
That bit of body horror hurts all the more because you lose more than just your life when you die. You lose every piece of equipment you brought into the match and also the stuff you looted along the way. Those stakes feel, at times, downright painful.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
