“ESCAPE//WILL//MAKE//ME//GOD”

Amidst the conclusion of the first season of Bungie’s Marathon, I’ve gotten to experience what I'd recall as a “dying masterpiece”
MARATHON is one hell of a game. A brutal extraction shooter driven by pure dopamine-fueled game-play and an all-time standout art direction that’s impossible to separate from any conversation about it.


Everything in MARATHON feels like it is colliding at once. Cyberspace. Corporate dystopia. A suffocating horror-like future where humanity has burned itself out, leaving supercomputers and AI to inherit what's left. Bodies are mass-produced by authoritarian corporations, revived again and again only to suffer, scavenge, and die chasing the last scraps of value scattered across dead worlds. Violence, greed, and revolution are the only remaining purposes of civilization. Tau Ceti IV stands as the ultimate casualty of that fate — a ruined colony planet where we, the “Shells,” return as resurrected consciousnesses searching for salvage, weapons, and whatever else might keep us alive for one more run. It’s merciless and it hooks you.

Game-play and lore are well tied together, so well that it spikes the interest even more than I ever would’ve thought from such a genre like extraction shooters. How the narrative employed in the game-play experience is genius. The cinematic short films released beforehand online do an incredible job establishing the world and its tone with absolute clarity and purpose. Even before playing, every font and frame was gripping, with branding creeping on clothes and buildings, constantly reinforcing the game’s typographic identity and presenting us with the narrative before playing. We’re introduced to the circle of life. How the mind never escapes; only the bodies are destroyed. How SekGen literally weaves new bodies for human consciousness to inhabit. The six corporations don’t preserve life out of compassion; they keep you alive because you’re profitable. Every successful run means more resources extracted, more wealth funneled upward. It’s horrifyingly impersonal, but to them, it’s just business. The amount of value these cinematics have after actually playing and understanding the game is insane.
The game truly got my attention. Addicting fast-to-slow game-play loop, with stakes so high that one-second decisions decide your fate. The loop is simple, entangled with loads of complex systems tied to every run. Shell selection and player upgrades — Vault and Amory management — lore driven faction-based contracts tied to codex entries — Seasonal levels and ranked matchmaking. A lot is happening, and it is confusing at the beginning. However, at last, every small system makes up for the full game-play experience and serves great for the overall experience. When it comes to gun-play, I won’t be the first to lecture others on how Bungie is the experts of creating clean and responsive gunplay. It’s very true though. It doesn’t feel like an average multiplayer shooter; yes, it clearly is a super competitive PVP experience, yet it doesn’t really present itself like it. It's hard to describe precisely what I mean, but it feels just that much better than what I came to expect. I can’t really put a word on it.


Marathon is visually stunning. Probably the most unique piece of work I've seen in gaming media. It is not directly realistic as seen in today’s gaming standards. Instead, it bends reality with artistic personality of the likes of Alberto Mielgo and Joseph Cross as lead art director for the game. Marathon uses “Graphic Realism” as a foundational motive. It is such a distinct stylistic choice of visual direction, blending realistic details in cohesion with sharp and bold animated environments and interactive objects. There’s a mixture of utilitarian designs being compromised by the modern technological implementations. The style is saturated, intended to act as a “canvas” for the game’s intense, dystopian atmosphere. This choice of direction amplifies the already clear contrast of the “blocky” industrial environment compared to the realistic space and landscape we walk on and ponder at in the distance. It seems like a convincing premise for the stylized interpretation of life within the futuristic setting Bungie is trying to capture.

Typography is heavily implemented in the graphic identity of Marathon. Everything we see carries numbers, words, motifs — Every single design presents us a purpose, complemented with a powerful color palette. It blows out, sparks our interest, fascinates us, and most importantly, makes us look at it. The flashy colors become part of the game’s larger visual contrast. Just as the stylized, almost 3D-printed environments clash against realistic sky boxes, the bright color palettes sharply oppose the grittiness of the rocks, mud, and stormy skies. It is so obvious in its intention and still so clever, really shining in its presentation of itself. The distinction it gives us is originality at its finest. No wonder the first few cinematic frames alone made me hooked. It is a genius choice of graphic design.

The graphic design also shows itself in the game’s UI with “Acid-trippy” loading screens, featuring glitchy effects with unsettling cinematics to look at. Quite literally the Silkworm weaving process, we got to know about in the reveal cinematic before release. It resembles how while we wait for the new game to start, our bodies are reconstructed, making us watch the process before the next raid. The UI is filled with different fonts, Cyberpunk 2077-like effects and colors. Different things happen on screen, while navigating Tau Ceti IV. It looks confusing at first glance, but it adds to the overall modern technological aspect of the bigger contrast. The interface design embraces a coherent visual language, using a “24/7” brutalist-inspired typeface similar to the one featured in the game’s artwork, combined with the bold color blocking and glitch-inspired effects that reinforce the game’s hacked, simulated world aesthetic. All of the “Shells” exhibit a functional designed appearance that adds to the utilitarian style, resembling the overall minimalist 3D-printed vibe, while small details on their appearance stand out with modern touches. The same thing counts for all of the weapons and gadgets.


One of the most noticeable features in Marathon is its soundscape and choice of music. Marathon has super alluring audio design that heavily influences the way we traverse and engage. All sounds are traceable, leading to enemy placements, In-game events happening, helping you navigate around your surroundings. One example is the various key rooms unlocking, screaming out such a distinct and scary sound, that nobody won’t hear it. It creates tension and stress. You have to be quick with looting and getting out before the whole lobby is at your destination. Super scary sound, which only is one of so many perceptible audio cues. This use of audio makes Marathon that much more intense, especially if playing solo. Ryan Lott’s OST of Marathon also adds to the overall cyberspace-horror vibe that the game excessively tries to match. The dark electronic scores help to create an immersive experience that is unsettling; however it delivers to the aesthetic of Marathon. The music is deeply connected to the soundscape to shape the atmosphere of Tau Ceti IV, intentionally blurring the boundary between musical composition and environmental audio. The score is filled with tension, creating a frantic feeling during high stake moments or quiet navigation.

I see a vision with this universe as a medium for more content than just seasonal updates and patches for Marathon. I need more visual shorts, games in other genres. art books and more. It’s a special thing Bungie’s got going on. One of the most intriguing game in modern gaming