For me, Marathon has always been a horror game. Following the largely friendly extraction world of Arc Raiders, Bungie’s latest has been filled to the brim with gleeful PvP players that just can’t wait to skin you alive in service to the game’s Death Cult, Arachne.

Despite this, Bungie’s extraction shooter is, by far, my favourite in the genre. As someone who isn’t very good at the same and just lost four Cryo Archive runs in a row (goodbye, gold Magnum), the deadliness of the game has yet to turn me away. However, as a runner that tries to avoid player-vs-player conflict if possible, I’ve noticed a sadistic turn in Marathon’s player base as they get more comfortable with the game.

As you move into the higher tier maps, namely Outpost and Cryo Archive, Marathon’s players are clearly more comfortable within the sci-fi world. Last night, running through the Pinwheel on Outpost, I heard another enemy team on Prox Chat actively hunting me down as I crawled through the location on a Rook run. “Oink, Oink, little piggy,” an enemy destroyer said as his thundering footsteps slammed above me.

In another Outpost run, myself and another runner were taken out by an enemy Rook who then screamed at us for the location of our third team member who had already taken off. “We don’t have a third, we’re on our own!” we shouted before making a plea, saying that Rooks are supposed to be friendly. “There are no friendly Rooks!” he shouted before plunging his knife into my gut.

Bizarrely, the most sadistic of my encounters with Marathon players always happen on Dire Marsh. On multiple occasions, likely due to a viral video that did the same thing, players have downed myself and my team, thrown down self-revives, watched us self-res, and then down us all over again. “Okay, this time I mean it,” they said, dropping a self-revive and leaving. As the self-res bar filled up, an enemy Thief from that team used their drone to pick the item out of my inventory, killing me.

In another run on Cryo Archive, the game’s new endgame area that’s only open on weekends, an enemy team adorned with gold shields immediately team wiped my crew. Kept from bleeding out by my own med-bot, I watched as an enemy Vandal took dropped item after item out of my teammate’s bag, commenting on the low quality of our loot as I was being actively tea-bagged by the other two. Honestly, that’s gaming right there.

Marathon has always been more PvP-focused than Arc, but there’s a fiendish ruthlessness running throughout the community as vaults are now overflowing with good guns. As someone who, as I mentioned earlier, tries to avoid conflict, Marathon is turning into The Walking Dead. Enemy runners are Jeffery Dean Morgan’s Negan, and I’m Stephen Yuen’s Glen about to get my head caved in.

I’ve played 75 hours of Marathon since launch, and there’s more PvP now than ever before. Players are hungry for the kill, and no amount of pleading will stop them. As prox chat becomes more common, you can actually hear the screams of players begging for their lives, myself included. (Who doesn’t love to scream The Punisher’s, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait; no, no, no, no, no”?)

Marathon is now the scariest multiplayer game around. Sorry, Dead by Daylight. If you’re a player that just wants to find good loot, complete quests, and read the game’s awesome codex entries, you’re being actively hunted by a maniacal group of psychopaths. It’s a game like no other, it’s thrilling, exhilarating, and the Honeymoon Period simply has yet to even come close to ending.