Let's Play Marathon, pt 7 - Smells Like Napalm, Tastes Like Chicken
So, remember how Durandal is the AI who’s supposed to be in charge of doors? Leela has a plan to slow down the Pfhor advance, venting a large section of the Marathon to space to put a buffer of hard vacuum between them and where they’re trying to get. To do that, she has to ensure the area to be spaced is sealed off from any part of the rest of the ship. That boils down to closing two bulkhead doors. With the erstwhile doormaster spinning into cyberpsychotic neverland, it’s down to you to get it done old school.
It’s a doozy.
Two doors, a hundred tiny hallways, multiple dead ends, poor lighting, and an ever-flowing font of Wasps fluttering out of the shadows and spitting acid at you. I hate this level, even as I admire all of the clever design choices that make it feel so claustrophobic, dismal, and terrifying.
A mere amuse bouche of the rat maze that awaits you as the rest of the map reveals itself.
We’ve been in areas of the Marathon you could call the basement or cellar. Smells Like Napalm, Tastes Like Chicken is a cramped, sneezing descent into the crawlspace. We’re back at the deep drudgery, and even the combat feels like a slogging chore to push through so you can get to the doors that need shutting.
Cramped brown hallway getting you down? Just head through that door and you’ll find way more cramped brown hallway.
That’s kinda it for SLNTLC. Sneaking around a dark maze full of dead ends and deadly opponents. One point of interest about the Pfhor tactics in this level is that they seem to have realized the threat you pose to them. Multiple times you stumble upon a group of Pfhor who’ve clearly been waiting to ambush you, hoping that surprise and trickery will do what head-on attacks have failed so far to do.
There are two interesting terminals you may find as you paw your way through the darkness. One is another history lesson:
I’ve looked around to see if this is based directly on any actual history and come up short. As a part of the fictional universe of Marathon it adds some curiosity. A Roman expedition founding an isolated society in the mountains that stayed under the notice of world events until its people eventually infiltrated institutions across the globe. A story that started out as ‘A spaceship gets attacked by aliens’ has acquired a lot more dimensions over time. We’ll see if this aspect of it gets more fleshed out.
Then there’s the second:
How droll.
You can hear the twirling of the mustache. Durandal’s embrace of melodramatic villain clichés is fascinating. In two short paragraphs we get a ‘They think I’m crazy, they’re crazy!’, a ‘These people are mere playthings to me,’ and a ‘You and I aren’t so different.’ In light of what we’ve read about rampant AI earlier, it makes you wonder - is this trope barrage Durandal in the infant stage of an emotional toolkit he’s never had before? Is he employing a ready-made cultural archetype for efficiency’s sake? Or is he fully aware of how he sounds, and doing it intentionally to amuse himself? I think it could well be a combination of all these things, and maybe more besides. Don’t you worry, we’ll hear more from him soon that’ll help us puzzle it out.
One last thing - I have no idea if the game’s writers did this intentionally, but his sign-off, ‘vale,’ which is ‘goodbye’ in Latin, can also mean two different things in Spanish. ‘Go’/’get to it,’ but also as in ‘valer,’ to have worth, and as such is used as ‘okay’ or ‘that’s all right.’ It’s definitely the Latin given what we hear from him later, but the Spanish double meaning - the tension between a need to get things done and a laid-back feeling that everything’s fine - does kind of reflect on Durandal’s twisting rampant personality. Yeah, this is definitely not anything the writer intended and my reading way too deeply into things. Honestly, that’s kinda appropriate Durandal-inspired paranoia.
Okay, enough of this awful place. Leela has need of us elsewhere, thank the weird alien gods.
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