The First Steps, in "Marathon"

Let's talk about the opening few hours of Bungie's newest shooter, "Marathon"!

Let’s get this out of the way from the jump: Marathon is really fucking good. I might go as far as to say I think it’s great already. Everything about this game fires on all cylinders. It feels incredible to play, it looks absolutely stellar with the art and visual design language feeling fresh, and singular all to itself, and on a story and lore basis, I think Bungie is doing perhaps their strongest work here since at least their (in my opinion) best Destiny 2 expansion, Forsaken.

I am not just enamored with it so far, 8 hours in (which I know, for a game like this is nothing), I am transfixed by it completely. I walk around thinking about this game in my day-to-day. I feel a way about this thing that I feel about very few video games these days. I have been put under a spell, and you know what? I am a willing captive here. Marathon feels special.

The art design, I think, is perhaps Marathon’s most striking feature right from the start. I’ve heard the look of Marathon described using fun terms like ‘health goth’ and ‘cyber runway’, and each descriptor I hear sounds more apt than the last. Those terms are evocative while also still not getting to the core of what Marathon looks like, truly. In some ways, we may have to make new descriptors for it. It’s that unique, I believe.

It’s incredibly one-of-one. I can’t think of another game I have seen that looks remotely like it. The best way I can think of describing Marathon is that it feels like a Coca-Cola bottle (stay with me…). There is a stark, eye-catching neon aesthetic base backing a timeless elegance to the typeface for scripts on every bit of Marathon that makes it feel like a grounded, cohesive world that a bunch of greedy mega-corporations would share. CyAc, NuCal, Traxus, Arachne, Sekiguchi, and Mida all feel like distinct, bespoke organizations, all with their own capitalistic ends, but each faction keeps with the extensive neon color wheel that Marathon uses for its visual palette, making the whole package look visually tied together in a bold, unique way. It borders on garish at times, too, but the pops of color that dot the biomes of Tau Ceti lend a welcome freshness to every frame.

This is _gantry. He is not really all “there”, let’s say. Mida wouldn’t be the same without him, though.

Bungie thought a lot about the look of Marathon, and it really shows. Maybe this will embolden studios to take more risks with their art design in the future. I liken the feeling I get from looking at Marathon to the phenomenon that was the visual boldness of that first Spider-Verse movie, where, after the fact, you saw more animation studios in the film industry taking more bold artistic risks with bigger-budget animated projects. I hope Marathon inspires that same innovation in the video game industry. It’s so cool. I think it’s just so, so cool to look at. I applaud their effort. Bungie really knows what they’re doing over there. Pay those artists anything they want!

In Tau Ceti, you must become one with your environment. Becoming a predator, in search of meek prey. Be careful, though, for there are always larger beasts stalking you, in kind.

So, the game, at its core, is an extraction shooter. You search for loot, accept quests for folks, and by the end of a round, you hopefully get away with some permanent gear (until you lose it, which you will)— rinse and repeat. Not usually my cup of tea. I didn’t really get into Arc Raiders last year, either, though, which is the ‘one of these’ that seemed to really hit with people. I liked it okay, but I was pretty mixed on a lot of aspects of its game design. There were too many vendors to interact with, far too many systems and loot to cycle through every match, and the random scavenging they would ask you to do to further your upgrade loops was tedious to say the least.

The other thing that seemed like a positive initially was the social dynamics involved, with proximity chat being enabled by default, allowing you to interact with opposing players. It’s a nice idea, I’ll say, but soon everything just went the way it always does with these prox chat games, where people get filthy good at the game, then shoot first and ‘tea-bag’ you, taking your hard-earned shit in the process. Not really into that whole aspect of it.

The thing Marathon gets right off the rip is that there is no talking. No gray areas. You see a Runner? You murder that fool, right there. No fucking games. I like that Bungie made this hardcore in that specific way, where there is no wiggle room to fuck around with the people opposing you. No, I have this knife, I am fucking hustling over to you, and I’m gonna stab you in your goddamn throat. I’m not here to party. I’m here to blow out your candles. I appreciate how to the point it all is. I’m down to wipe out anyone standing in my way.

I had a very funny altercation last night with a rando where I saw him vault over a short wall in the distance while playing Dire Marsh, solo. I was playing ‘Destroyer’, the ‘Titan'-like’ Destiny equivalent in Marathon, for those familiar, so I zoomed in using the short-burst jet dash he has to close the gap, got the jump in his flank, knifed him once, and then put him down with my SMG. As he was going down, I heard him shout, “Curse you! Curse you!!! I curse you forever!” as I reached down to kill him with a finishing move. I ended his run yelling back: “GET FUCKED BUDDY!” and finished him off. Now that interaction, I liked. I didn’t have to tap dance with the guy; I won, he lost, and after all that, I took his shit. That was the end of it.

I’ve been down a lot, for sure, but that’s the price for making a mistake. That’s just it, every time I die, I know I made a mistake. An error that is easily erased with a fresh new run every time. It takes the guesswork, the tedium, and the all-around minutiae out of dreading the loss of your gear, your time, and your patience, out of it. You get knocked out, try again, buddy. You may have lost it this time, but you’ll be damned if you aren’t jumping in again to get your ‘get back’.

The PvP is hardcore for sure, but the NPC enemies are no push-overs either. The UESC forces that are trying to keep you from fulfilling your contractual obligations in Marathon are just as lethal as other players. They move and behave similarly to real humans in some cases. They can cloak, flank you, pop large shields, and throw explosives your way just like a person can, and it’s a credit to Bungie and their very smart AI enemies that each encounter feels dangerous and satisfying every time.

Keep your eyes peeled and your guns at the ready. These bots don’t mess around.

Bungie is known for this sort of thing, too; both Halo and Destiny have very smart enemies, smarter than your average stock-standard baddie in shooters, and that intelligence and complexity in design are apparent whenever you stumble upon an enemy encampment. There are bosses and elite soldiers, who can also yield great loot upon elimination, as well. There is a certain number of exfil zones to extract at any given time, too, with some even being guarded by enemies once the beacon has been lit to return to the colony ship. The PvE portions are just as well-designed as the PvP encounters, here. Every time you are fighting an enemy, be it human or AI, it feels gratifying because of all the systems at work under the hood, all working in concert to create one of the best shooters in the genre. It’s so much fun to keep going and going and going, until soon, you’ve lost track of time altogether.

That’s the cyclical nature of Marathon. That’s why it’s so addicting. You have quests, and they are usually not contingent on exfilling (but in some cases they are), which is nice, because when you finish a contract for a corporation, anything else you do in a match is gravy on top of that feeling, satisfying, and contributing to a successful run. The best thing about the design of Marathon is that it cuts to the bone. It shears all the cruft and the fat off the idea of the extraction shooter. It makes every gunfight brief, violent, and brutal, and along the way, provides just the amount of incentive to return for another go once you either get out or ‘get got’. I think objectively it’s truly one of the most elegantly designed games we’ve had in recent years on the multiplayer front.

This is just a little post talking about my time with the game. It’s really great so far, and I hope that it continues to be exciting the more I play it. Bungie released some ‘endgame content’ recently with a new area called the ‘Cryo Archive’, which only allows the best and most prepared Runners to participate. You have to have a certain value for your vault to even be considered to enter this new zone, and you have to assemble keys gathered from the various other maps in the game to even get to the final boss of the zone. That’s not even getting into getting out of the zone to exfiltrate, which is hidden to all team members save for one. It takes a lot of resources and coordination to do, and it sounds daunting, but I am really looking forward to checking it out soon. It’s Marathon’s version of a Destiny raid, and I hope I can get enough experience to take part one day. I am incredibly curious about it.

Destiny raids were always my favorite content in those games, and I hope I can get into this place one day. Like… what is going on in there, right? I gotta know!

For now, I am deeply in love with this game, and I hope to keep playing it for a very long time. I was hoping this game would be good, but never could I have expected that it would already be one of my favorites of the year, and the biggest surprise of 2026, so far, for me. It’s awesome that Bungie pulled it off.

This isn’t really a review; it’s more of an impressions piece. Maybe I’ll do another one of these down the road? Who knows! Having played a significant amount of it, as of now, I feel like I can highly recommend it based on what I have played. It’s one of the best shooters in years, looks unlike anything else out there, and feels incredible to play. I adore Marathon. Take my word for it. It’s $40 bucks. Get in there, and thank me later! (I’m also looking for other Runners too, so if you are interested, please hit me up! I’d love to play with you.)

Like Dave Dameshek always says, “It’s been a little slice of heaven.”