Let's Play Marathon, pt 3 - Never Burn Money

We have an ally, a cause, and a bigger gun, which means we can start attending to the defense proper of our ship. The Marathon’s manufacturing center is making new hardware components, and it’s up to us to fetch them so they can be installed in the automated defense hub.

Never Burn Money is dark and feels kind of depressing to walk around in. It’s also the first level in which the combat ramps up into any kind of challenge, which adds to the unpleasantness.

It’s a sad dark room, but at least it has a window to let in some dark from the adjacent sad dark room.

This level doesn’t want you here. It lights your way begrudgingly, didn’t tidy up before you arrived, and let the aliens have the run of the place. It gives off the impression that it just wants to be left alone to manufacture components and perform other minor industrial and machining tasks in peace and quiet. I suspect that in the course of the ship’s normal operation, automated systems would tidily take care of the fetch job you’re doing.

Do not be fooled by Construction Pillar’s warm, welcoming color scheme.

Never Burn Money functions as a rude awakening to the kind of grit-your-teeth combat and desperate ship-hopping you’re going to have to do in order to stave off the attack. The first two levels might have led you to believe that once you’d established a rapport with the friendly AI and gotten a larger weapon, it would be time to lead the charge into the heart of the invading force and thwart it with derring-do. This level dispenses with any Quixotic delusions. You’re going to be flung up one side of the Marathon and down the other, fending off overwhelming attacks and nervously counting bullets as you patch holes in a bucket that’s springing new leaks every moment.

That’s it for this level, though. You survive long enough to collect three circuit boards from their spots so Leela can zap you away to install them.

Unless you happen to press the ‘interact’ key next to an unassuming patch of wall and it turns out to be a door. Never Burn Money has a secret room, and it’s, uh…

I’m depraved on accounta I’m deprived.

You plummet into a deep chamber with unreachable ledges from which enemies pelt you with shock bolts. If you manage to kill them first, you’re still trapped. The only way out is revealed by what you find down there: Grenade rounds and a short term impervious shield that makes you look like static.

Scrambling for cover.

It is possible to grenade-jump your way up the wall until you reach a high ledge with a teleport pad. I admit, as I played through the level on this go, I wasn’t able to do it, and I didn’t have time for the number of tries it would probably have taken. I’ll just have to fondly reminisce on the way it felt when I first made it up that wall so long ago. If you make it, you’re put through a teleportation guessing game, trying to pick the right pad to step on in several tiny chambers. Only then are you rewarded with arguably the weirdest terminal in the game. It’s a short story. You can read it here.

The story uses several overlapping metaphors of powerlessness. Gherritt White is locked in a cell. He’s being beaten up by a schoolyard bully. He’s in the sea at the mercy of the waves. Alongside these images of concrete forces are more dreamlike ones - he’s floating in the air with no purchase on the ground, and his arms melt into each other, swallowing up his hands.

As the story moves toward its climax, these images wrap around and mix with one another. Meanwhile he hears himself speaking from outside, and in a Lovecraft nod, is haunted by the sound of rats chewing in the walls. The imagery shifts from external sources of powerlessness to internal ones seemingly about Gherritt’s control over his own mind, and the images spiral in toward each other until they blur and merge.

In the end, we see him catch one of the rats and kill it. The emblem of madness, audible through the walls but never seen, is made solid enough to catch and defeat. This seems to be about gaining control of one’s thoughts and fears, finding a way to look at the source of one’s unease and alter perception until it becomes tangible, controllable, and manageable. As this happens, the flotation that was keeping him from finding purchase becomes flight. The waves that were battering him down become the method of his escape, as he learns their pattern and understands how to work with them rather than against them.

“He escaped into the waves. The waves.”

With that, it’s time for us to escape to Marathon’s next level. We’ve reached the end of ‘Arrival,’ and the next chapter awaits.

***End Message***

***JUMP PAD ACTIVATION INITIATION START***
***TRANSPORT WHEN READY***