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? Gone forever. It hurts. 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. It reminds me of a Dark Souls or Hollow Knight game. If you die and then fail to reclaim your lost Souls or Rosaries before you die again, you lose them forever. In many games, the only thing you lose upon death is the time spent playing, so the stakes of Marathon alone foster feelings of anxiety and, at times, downright fear.
The worst thing you can say about Marathon is that it’s very difficult, often punishingly so — and at its core, that’s what establishes Marathon as one of the scariest gaming experiences in recent memory. Earlier this week, live-streamer Shroud called the game “a little too sweaty.” Ninja rage quit on launch day after only a few matches, bemoaning the fact that the AI enemies were more challenging than enemy players. (He also screamed “this game is ass!” at some point.) The fact is, under almost any circumstances, you can die quickly in Marathon. Around every corner, there could be somebody waiting to stab you in the face. If you’re a jumpy person like me, you’ll probably wind up yelping out of fear pretty often.
Proximity chat adds another interesting layer to the mix. If you knock a player down, sometimes they’ll beg for their life — or more likely, cuss you out. In one viral clip I saw, a downed player let out a blood-curdling primal scream. (How much loot did that poor man lose?) This recontextualizes the gameplay, transforming opponents into a murderer and a victim — especially when the finishing blow is often a brutal stab in the chest. It’s a stark contrast to the trendy extraction shooter Arc Raiders, whose community tends to be a lot more friendly to other players, especially solo players, when they identify as friendly. (In one semi-viral Marathon clip, a player gets quickly knocked down when trying to enter the building. Exasperated, he says he was just trying to complete his missions. “This ain’t Arc Raiders my boy,” his assailant said coldly. The victim laughs as the knife hits his chest.)
Marathon is at its scariest when you solo queue as Rook, a locked Runner shell that gives you a free loadout that includes a random basic weapon and other bits of gear. With the other classes, you join a team of up to three players, but Rook forces you to enter a match that’s already in progress totally alone. So while other people are playing an extraction shooter game, the Rook experience is basically straight-up survival horror. Sure, Rook can cloak himself so that UESC enemies ignore him, and he also has a self-repair ability. But as Rook, you’re wandering alone through half-destroyed buildings that have sometimes already been looted, usually littered with bodies. At this point in the match, the surviving players have usually stocked up on enough great gear that they can easily kill you.
Through proximity chat, a Rook can technically team up with other Rooks or even regular players, but solely through a risky verbal social contract. Every time I play Rook, I tremble as I grab as much loot as I can before exfiltrating as soon as I can. It can feel pathetic at times, but it’s honest work that grants genuinely meaningful progression.
Marathon forces you to be strategic in this way. It’s not about rushing your goals, but about pushing outward into the boundaries of the playable space around you in tactical ways that guarantee your survival. You have to pick your battles or else you run the risk of losing everything.
Because of all the fear and unease at the core of Marathon, there’s no greater thrill than actually exfiltrating by the skin of your teeth. I stumbled upon a clip posted to X by content creator Airwing Marine. As his squad sprints towards the final exfil site, he’s knocked down, but thanks to his Triage Runner shell, he’s able to self-revive and make it to the site with less than a second remaining. The first time I successfully exfiltrated, I had a similar experience where I was downed, then had to crawl across a platform and throw myself off it before crawling a dozen or so more meters into the exfil site. A UESC robot caught up to me and began draining my body, but there was only a few seconds left before the exfil tower activated. Literally two seconds before I would have died, I successfully made it off Tau Ceti IV — and I flipped the bird at the robot who almost got me.
