I've never seriously played an MMORPG. I played maybe an hour of World of Warcraft during its heyday at a friend's urging, but found it immediately boring. Nor am I much for shooters, especially in a competitive context; I played a bit of Halo and Halo 2 multiplayer when they were the biggest thing in video games, and enjoyed myself, but I never got good and I certainly didn't feel the drive to hone my skills on the grindstone of Xbox Live.

But I've been playing Marathon. I'm still playing Marathon. I would have written this very review months earlier, except that I was too busy playing Marathon.

It's a surprise that I like this so much. Even my girlfriend who loves trying to push me out of my video game comfort zone almost as much as she loves Marathon (both the 90s and 2020s incarnations) didn't bother encouraging me to play it. But I had a gap in my gaming schedule and an itch to play something with a sense of both action and progression, so I gave it a shot and was blown away by what I found.

Marathon clearly isn't an MMO. There's no persistent game world, even in the Destiny "shared-world" sense, and the game progression is entirely based on the items you bring back from short-lived runs. But my more controversial contention is that Marathon isn't entirely a shooter, either.

Certainly, for those drawn to FPS team fights, this game delivers in spades. I'm told by aficionados of the genre that the guns have "the Bungie sauce". The character-shooter-style shells all play distinctly while remaining balanced among each other. The level design allows for hugely diverse engagements with lots of opportunities to play the map for advantage rather than relying on raw aim fundamentals.

But even here I'm betraying my own biases, because my aim fundamentals are still weak. This game has been driving me to get better, because no part of it is fully separable from the whole, but I've got a lot of practice to do before I can go toe-to-toe with people who have been playing Overwatch and Fortnite and Apex for years. The places I make up the difference, and which keep drawing me into the game even 800 hours in, are those in which you can shift the focus away from raw shooting and towards the rest of the game.

Here is Marathon's fundamental brilliance (and possibly that of the nascent extraction shooter genre as a whole): by making the fundamental goal retaining and accumulating loot, which is distinct from but in dialog with fighting other people, it produces complex and intense emergent experiences of a sort I rarely see in games.

As an example, Marathon is the most effective survival horror game I've ever played in terms of making me actually emotionally afraid. As much as I love the mechanical genius of Resident Evil or the writing of Silent Hill 2, neither of them made me feel terror. Playing Marathon, hiding in the tunnels with the loot I stole from a real human team, listening to their footsteps over my head as they search for me, knowing that all that stood between me and my demise was my own ability to outthink and outmaneuver them—then, I felt terror.

As another example, Marathon is a game about knowing the terrain. I was in a firefight through a doorway, accompanied by two teammates who were no more confident at raw gunplay than I. We'd fought to a standstill, and I told them to hold the door and keep the enemy's attention. I crept through a vent, knowing it would lead me to a platform just above the other team, where I rained gunfire upon them, breaking the stalemate and yielding us a victory against superior fighters with better gear. This is a game about playing smart, and on my best days, I can be smart.

To play Marathon is to play a hundred different games at once. It's an FPS, sure, but it's also survival horror, it's stealth action, it's a puzzle game, it's a game about navigation, it's a game about psychogeography, and on rare occasions it's even a game about making friends. The game is carefully structured so that stories unfold as part of the play, and I find that as fascinating to witness as an art form as it is fun to engage in as a player.

I don't know how much longer this game will be around. The industry doesn't seem to be doing well, Bungie is certainly not thriving under its Sony overlords, and Marathon will never be the money fountain that Destiny was in its heyday (even Destiny for all its success is now officially over). I'm just glad I'm getting to experience this while it's here, while the lobbies are still filled with players, before this beautiful moment fades into memory and lore.