Everything from the atmosphere to losing your gear upon death makes me so afraid

Ed. note: This story was originally published in March. We're republishing it today in celebration of Spooky Season.

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.

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