Let's Play Marathon, pt 10 - Blaspheme Quarantine
“Anyone who plays video games will be able to recall a point where they got stuck. A spot they found themselves coming back to time after time and hurling themselves at an impossible fight, fiddling fruitlessly with an uncrackable puzzle, or wandering aimlessly looking for an invisible path. In this most formative game, G4 Sunbathing was my sand trap.”
I wrote that on this blog a full year ago. It seems G4 Sunbathing found a new way to weave its ancient curse upon my bloggy bones. But at long last we’re moving on to explore the latest in early Bungie’s level-naming brilliance, Blaspheme Quarantine. What says our friendly terminal this time?
It takes a villain to raise a stake
Foreshadowing fulfilled. If we’ve been wondering what Durandal would do with us once he had us in his clutches… this level admittedly doesn’t tell us a lot. Unless ‘screw around with us for goofs’ was the grand plan. Blaspheme Quarantine, as advertised, has us winnowing our way through the Marathon’s quarantine deck. You start in a group of small isolation chambers, slowly figuring out which of many doors and hatches connect to what, and finding hidden elevators connecting to the outside chamber. Which is chock full of aliens.
The other green-eyed monster
There are multiple instances of Pfhor ambush through this level, and unlike the ones you run into on Cool Fusion, there’s a sense that both you and the aliens are surprised when you bump into each other and an uneventful walk down a hallway suddenly becomes a swan dive through clouds of bullets, sparks, and flying ichor. The little tidbit Leela dropped early on - that Durandal is the AI responsible for doors - is really brought to life here, as huge pockets of enemies suddenly sweep into your space. It’s easy to imagine Durandal strategically opening and closing hatches and panels in order to corral whole platoons of the attackers right into your path.
Alieñata
Eventually you find your way to an exit and the second part of the level. This being the quarantine section, there are no doors or corridors out, you’re in an isolated compartment only accessible by teleport. Stepping into the teleport pad, you zip over from the personnel quarantine section to quarantine storage. It’s another effective use of a transition between a small, tight zone and a big, roomy zone.
The caution stripes are because that entire thing moves up and down
This is one of Marathon’s many ‘multiple elevator platforms and multiple switches’ puzzles - not a very difficult or important-seeming one, just a big room with an annoying sequence you have to hit in order to cross to the other side and leave. It’s a big room full of nothing. Durandal has a few more things to say here.
Notably Unstable should be a podcast title
Durandal is the master of doors, the keeper of portals, the watchman at the gate, and he is drunk and hallucinating and growing a mustache to style himself the dastardliest dastard who ever dasted. “If things around here aren’t working, it’s because I’m laughing so hard” has stuck firmly in my head ever since I first read it.
It interests me that Durandal is in charge of passage and movement, because his rampancy seems to involve a complete reevaluation of where, figuratively, life’s doors should lead to, and which of them is worthwhile. He commands access, but seems to be wondering which places are worth leaving, worth going to, and whether any of this movement has purpose or significance. He’s always been in charge of the in between and is thinking for the first time about whether there is an actual place that he belongs.
Meanwhile, he’s happy to embody the melodramatic villain role to satirical excess, for his own amusement and for your continued frustration. And when you teleport to a further section of this deck, it eventually leads you through a long, twisting, winding passage, all the way to… the exact spot you started in. You reemerge at the first room of the level, Durandal lets you know that he’s deigned to give Leela access to another terminal nearby, you slug it out with one more Pfhor ambush and reunite with Leela - but with the uneasy sense that the moment Durandal decides to hijack your efforts again, nothing’s going to stop him.
