As the server slam comes to a close, Bungie’s Marathon has seemingly already found its core audience amongst the ever-present online discourse. As some dub the stylish multiplayer game as “fontslop”, the game’s fans are falling in love with the new extraction shooter, and I’m definitely one of them.

Amidst the vibrant look and the effortlessly slick feel of Marathon, there’s something I did not entirely suspect: an actual story. As a Bungie game, this should have been a given, but the extraction shooter genre has never been one for a cohesive narrative, including the recent addition of Arc Raiders with its clunky AI-voiced NPCs.

In Marathon, we’re tasked with exploring Tau Ceti IV to discover what the hell happened to the titular UESC Marathon. In the server slam, this has been teased with rampant AI and haunting voice logs in the game’s surprisingly deep codex. There is a story here, it’s engaging, and it’s seemingly teasing something that may actually change how the game works.

If you’re a fan of the original Marathon series, you’ll know that the games never just featured the UESC. For the most part, alongside the rogue AI Durandal, the series largely focused on the alien threat of the Pfhor which attacked the original Marathon colony with an electromagnetic pulse.

Now, I’m not going to go through and explain the lore of the entire Marathon series as that would require an article of its own that I simply do not want to write, but the series ends with the protagonist jumping between alternate realities. This Marathon, the new Marathon, is seemingly one of those realities with a Durandal that remembers, and an alien threat that has not yet shown its face. (I really recommend the MandaloreGaming trilogy of videos to get up to speed on the older games, by the way.)

One of the most terrifying moments of Helldivers 2 was the introduction of The Illuminate, a third alien faction that decimated Super Earth colonies and even attacked the home of democracy. With Marathon, all signs point to their own alien invasion with multiple teases during the server slam that the Pfhor are not only present in this reality, but they have something to do with the destruction of the colony.

Across your runs, you can already find alien substances across the ruins of the colony, hinting that there’s something out there that was present during the colony’s mysterious destruction. However, as one player has shared online, you can also find “Confiscated Colonial Folklore” valuables with a description that reads: “some colonists sought comfort in building new beliefs around alien visages…”

This figurine made by the colonists from reused food wrappers and sticks looks almost exactly like a Pfhor Minor S’pht, aka the Compiler, from the original Marathon game with a deep red cloak and a glowing green core inside. So far, aliens are not enemy types within Bungie’s extraction shooter, but it certainly seems like the studio is teasing the introduction of a brand-new faction at some point in the shooter’s lifespan.

Bungie’s Marathon is the first extraction shooter to have a story that I actually care about. While taking out Arcs in Arc Raiders can be satisfying, I’ve never felt the narrative push to make Speranza a better place. Arc Raiders has agents, Marathon has characters, and the deeply sinister feeling that something has gone wrong is drawing me deeper and deeper into its world.

Of course, I could be very wrong, and the Pfhor may never come to Bungie’s new Marathon game. Simply put, Durandal could simply be remembering other realities and created a new religion in this one around the alien race. However, if the Pfhor are real in the new game, and they are coming, Marathon might not only have its own Helldivers 2 moment, but one of the coolest moments in multiplayer history.