Played Lately: Marathon

• The Marathon Server Slam is ongoing as I type this. For those not aware, Marathon is an extraction shooter, the new game dev flavor of the season, following hard on the heels of battle royale and hero shooters. The pitch is straightforward: enter a match with whatever gear you can muster, collect new gear in the field, and get out again alive. And if you fail to do so, you lose everything you had with you. The question is, and it's one I pondered for a long time, what is the fun of that?


• I jumped into Marathon, at least somewhat convinced that if anyone can make the genre palatable, it would be Bungie. What I discovered was a highly polished, meticulously styled game that killed me three times in the tutorial. That didn't deter me. I pressed forward with my fourth attempt and finally exfiltrated successfully. I loved it. So what was the answer I found?


• Marathon is a horror game where often you are the prey, but sometimes you are the predator.


• I die far more often than I succeed. Most runs end with just a few XP to my name and a few credits if I got really lucky. But then there are the real nailbiters where I get the drop on someone and ruin their run instead. There was this one run where I'm dashing across the water in Dire Marsh and this guy blasts me out of nowhere. My shields are down and I'm hurting, but he hasn't fired again. I turn and draw down on this guy as he just stares at me and I empty my gun into him. He might have been my mirror since he was running a Vandal and free kit. But he hesitated and I didn't. It was exhilarating.


• It's the moments like that I keep coming back for. It's the leaping into a exfil beacon at the last second to get out of town. It's seeing a runner emerge from a duct in front of me and watching him back away, knowing it wasn't worth it for either of us. It was getting downed at a guarded exfil beacon only for it to lift me away one pip before my shell was compromised.


• I don't know if Marathon is special or if I've been missing out on something just because it sounded too hard. Whatever the answer, I'll be back for the official launch to see just how far I can push back on that cruel world.