If you've gotten this far in the Marathon trilogy, you already know the song and dance. Enter into a weird maze, hunt for terminals, shoot aliens, get lost in said maze, find another terminal or absurdly positioned teleporter and get to the next level.

And yet, despite Marathon Infinity being almost identical to Marathon 2: Durandal in many (technical/gameplay/artistic) regards, it has this incredible mysticism behind it. Almost certainly within the enigma wrapped in a mystery storytelling that's so strange, so intent on you not figuring it out that you have no choice but to go deeper down the rabbit hole.

Once I beat the last level and the final screen started rolling it didn't quite feel like the 'end' of Marathon (and that's not because of the upcoming soft reboot), but instead like I was presented with a key to comprehending the universe-bending, philosophically inclined, and childishly humoured nature of what Marathon is... at all? Afterwards I spent the next few hours going through the marathon.bungie.org website, piecing together the terminal entries I had already read with the ones I had missed, alongside a plethora of community interpretations, scattered clues, and veiled references in the games Bungie produced for the nearly 30 years afterwards.

That exploration not only within the game, but without is something no other piece of fiction has ever replicated for me, and I cannot get enough of this trilogy's endless bullshit.

Of course, there's still a game attached to the absurd story going on, and it's pretty damn good! The environments are decently varied, enemies are still as fun and threatening to fight as always, with the added sauce of suped-up BOBs both fighting on your side and against. The final level is absolutely my favourite level in the franchise, with how it puts together all of the best bits of Marathon (listening to the terminals for advice, your own exploration, a bunch of slick combat encounters, and gorgeously strange environment art) into an epic conclusion.

4.5/5 - "See ya starside."

You play as a philosophical and literal zombie at the whims of gods who don't care. One of them is even funny.

I don't think in the 30 following years of FPS's we've come close to what Durandal and Infinity have done. The genre built upon power fantasies put you in the shoes of an enhanced human, a perfect killing machine, yet our actions are minimazed in the face of much superior opponents and literal reality-warping mechanisms. The power fantasy is dismantled and replaced by abstraction, upon which the Cyborg is a tool, and not even at all times fully aware of who is his master.

Whenever I write, I nurse self-hatred for my lack of emotional wonder. I just can’t get tied up in fiction anymore, which often makes my perspective on narrative entirely worthless. I’ll start on something new, and abruptly quit when I grimly realize that I haven’t empathized enough to make the critique worth reading. However, I can sometimes disguise my numbness by asserting that a story didn’t do enough to make me care, a statement which sounds wonderfully cogent while actually being entirely empty. It doesn’t really answer the question of why something may or may not be worth experiencing, it’s just a circumstantial punt, it’s the argumental equivalent of cutting the Gordian Knot. If Alexander wanted to be the ruler of all Asia, he had to find a way to untie it, but he simply cut it apart and said it was the same thing. A convenient trick to be sure, but destroying a question isn’t the same as answering it.

Despite having some flagrantly terrible views, DMX also had one quote which I spend a lot of time thinking about. "Sometimes people want to feel worse, they don't always want to feel better. However the fuck you want to feel, there should be a song that helps you feel that way… who the fuck wants to be happy all the time?". The popularity of difficult games, horror games, or even sad story-driven games proves the point to some degree, but each of those genres are associated with niche appeal. Maybe it speaks to the idea that people’s lives generally skew towards negative emotions, so mainstream media leans towards positivity in response. However, emotions don’t always fit nicely onto a negative-positive line, and the most profound moments in life almost never do. So, if your doctor recommended that you experience something existentially confusing for a well-rounded emotional diet, would you act on that?

Every night, I do a routine, in a neat loop around my house. I check my bathroom sink for drips, I check all the electronics in my office are off, I check my garage door is closed, I check the front door is locked, I check the stove is off, I check the dog’s fed, and I check the back door is locked. I choose to do all of that so I can sleep without worrying. However, I’ll do it twice, and that’s not something I would say I choose to do, necessarily. It’s a compulsion, something I’m emotionally pushed to do despite the fact that there’s no reason for it. I’m someone who’s proud to be logical, but I end every day with what’s essentially a ritual to ward off evil. My brain has a recurring argument against itself and loses.

What stood out to me about Marathon was that it wasn’t fun. Specifically, in how that un-fun quality felt intentional, as you fight through cramped, winding corridors with a tight ammo supply provided by a mad AI who deems you hardly worthy of the effort. Again, it feels like Marathon was reevaluating the rules of its genre before they had been firmly established in the first place, as if it was satirizing an event which had yet to happen. You don’t get thrilling arenas where you get to go nuts, you don't get a BFG, and you don’t get any boss fights. You certainly don’t get a story even as minimalistically gratifying as killing every demon on Mars. The question you have to grapple with as a player is how much that’s worth experientially, when you know the design intent of its unorthodoxy was only to set it apart from its contemporaries, and is only incidentally set apart from later games. I think that’s why the series exudes a certain mystery though, it feels equidistant from the past and future no matter when that happens to be.

There’s a celebrated episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation which really bothers me. It’s titled “Tapestry”, with Picard living the alternate life he would have led, had he been a more risk-averse person. He comes to rage against the path-not-taken and how his alternate self never lived up to his potential. I always thought that was an extremely unfair assessment though, since prime-Picard completely inhabited the shoes of alt-Picard, rather than viewing his life and perspective in totality. Maybe alt-Picard’s lifestyle was truly more fulfilling, with a career he genuinely enjoyed as a balanced part of his life, rather than being submerged in the all-consuming responsibility of captaining a starship. Maybe he would rage just as much against the prime timeline’s lifestyle, of commanding people to their deaths and perpetuating astro-political conflict. I think the message of the show should have been twofold, in that it’s easy to feel like the grass is greener on the other side, but when it isn’t, you should try to be holistically understanding of your alternate selves.

This review contains a minor spoiler for Marathon, specifically of a plot detail mentioned in an optional terminal near the start of the game, and heavily implied throughout the rest of it. That spoiler is how the main character is a battleroid, a cyborg created by enhancing a dead body. So, even in the earliest days of shooters, we had a perfect hero to satirize the genre: a corpse electronically commanded to propagate. If that’s the hero of this world, maybe it should have been left to rot the same way. For games this bleak, you’ll often hear “the best narrative choice is to not play the game”, but that’s a smug punt of the issue if you ask me. It’s sorta like saying that you should destroy the universe when you get hungry. Something’s gotta die for your biology to keep functioning, or you have to just accept your own death, but the ideal solution isn’t to erase the concept of life altogether.

Puzzle games are designed around balancing signal and noise, nudging players towards correct solutions while also obscuring them enough to provide satisfaction. That’s the reason why Portal increases the amount of white portal-able surfaces over time, it creates difficulty by flooding areas with possibilities while removing distinctiveness from areas relevant to a solution. The same concept applies to mysteries in general: butlers have killed enough nobles to where the choice of murderer goes without saying, but that’s also why they’re chosen as red herrings to obscure the truth. However, in either case, the difference between signal and noise is only revealed once a solution has been found, and in the case of a surreal mystery, there may not be an unambiguous solution at all. You reach a point where logic fails and you’re forced to arrive at a conclusion based on a feeling. That’s what's unique about the surreal, though. It gives you the intellectual freedom to find signal through noise, but only if you’re capable of doing the same on an emotional level.

I'm hovering between the 3.5 and 4 buttons, full of torment and indecision. I suppose I have to give something for the raw ambition of the game, because it's fuckin wild.

I can explain the plot of Marathon Infinity very easily. At the end of Marathon 2, the P'fhor blew up the nearest sun, which they didn't realize contained a Lovecraft. As a result, things are getting David Tennent Voice Timey-Wimey, and you jump between several different timelines and a handful of abstract dream sequences until you end up in one where it's possible to stop that disaster from happening. All of this is actually supported by lore in the previous games, but you aren't explicitly told anything beyond hints until pretty much the last map of the game.

Infinity stands both as an integral part of the trilogy, and something totally separate. You don't start in the original timeline, and you never see the events of M2 through anything other than a distorted lens. You already had a conclusion to the conflict and even an epilogue taking place thousands of years later. A lot of the strange, unanswered questions left at the end of M2 are not actually answered here. Hell, Durandal isn't even talking to you for the vast majority of the plot.

And yet, without Infinity you'd miss out on so much. Bungie had developed plenty of toys, both narrative and mechanical, and this almost feels like a level pack intended to get the most from them. You finally get some insight into what being with the P'fhor is like, and some very funny glimpses into their bureaucracy. You get to spend a lot of quality time with Tycho, who was really under-characterized before. You get the confirmation that the player character is a cyborg, which is really really obvious from game 1 but it's in here.

I guess my main problem really is just that I didn't like playing the levels as much as M2. The 'level pack' thing carries over to them just feeling like some master levels for DOOM shit where it's harder than I'd want. Fighting humans is actually really tough because they have the game's only real hitscan weapons, the save points and shield recharge stations have some real asshole placements, and we see the return of bullshit switch puzzles where you get no idea what small thing changed on the other end of the map, or that you need to hit that one switch but then hit it again with the right timing. Also, you get hit by the hard enemies very quickly, with the final levels introducing a few new high-end guys that are even tougher. Those final levels are actually pretty reasonable for combat difficulty, though. My choke points were in the really specific solutions more than the "here's a billion dudes to kill" parts.

That said, I would be remiss not to point out that the actual level geography kicks ass. These feel a lot more like real places, and the architecture is intricate and well thought-out. The dam level is just incredible dude, even if navigating it sucks. The one new level type/wall texture is the big alien space station that you start and end the game in, as well as visit at the end of each failed timeline if you happen to find the secret entrance, and it's great. The ambient noise and claustrophobic corridors evoke nothing less than the atmosphere of the original Marathon.

I actually find myself wishing for a little more narrative coherence. Even within a single timeline, you often end up changing allegiances multiple times, sometimes just having to feel it out based on who is shooting you unprovoked. Some of the most important plot points are actually really subtle and missable. There is sort of a thematic reality to this relating to destiny and the AI self-awareness angle and blah blah blah but really it could have been sold better with a teensy bit more explicit messaging in the right places. The first time you enter a timeline and find yourself in a civil war where SOME enemy types are hostile is fantastic, though, so don't change that.

Oh, uh, there's only one new gun in this and it's meh.

Anyway I've definitely convinced myself into clicking the 4 while writing this. Great series. This is the one with all the custom levels but don't start with it that would be ridiculous. Special thanks to Woodaba for linking me to Aleph One and showing me these are incredibly easy to obtain and play in the modern day.