Among the first things you see in the Marathon reboot playtest is a close-up of a barcoded moth, gleefully chowing on some larval diodes. It’s not even the first cybernetic insect motif I’ve encountered in an FPS this week, but it speaks to me. Friends, we are all that kooky little bug, crawling down overheated silicon canyons, nuzzling at chips, for this is the Nvidia era, the Nvidiascene, and the whole world has become a GPU, dedicated to generating recipe ideas for the three edible objects in your fridge.

Quick, shoot it! Blow it all to hell! Ah, but first you have to complete the prologue. A dreamslick of Modern Warfare briefings and WipEout iconography spills you out onto a weather-beaten hillside, there to learn the basics of health and shield replenishment, melee attacks, and inventory management. Having pocketed your first handful of credits, you break the floor grill in a locked-down bunker, squidging down a tube of serial numbers like you’re exiting the womb.

There are red-eyed robot squads to headshot as you comb a couple of cracked plastic habitats for scrap and crafting materials. I kind of love this point in any looting game, the point when all the specific loot varieties do not make a lick of sense, and death comes quickly while you peer in confusion at the nobbly doodads in your inventory. Nuzzle those chips, little bug! Nuzzle until it all becomes second nature.

I enjoyed my first hour in Marathon’s server slam less for the shooting, which is a sturdy and unsurprising rhythm of ADS and special abilities on cooldown, than for engaging with art direction that vaguely channels my feelings of overwhelm and exhaustion about today’s computer industry, from whose generative AI fixation the entire global economy now hangs.

Marathon casts you as a brain wirelessly operating a choice of ribbed and bevelled cyberbodies that correspond to RPG classes, such as Vandal (fast and disruptive) or Destroyer (tough and damaging). Your job is to board a long-lost interstellar ark and strip it for parts on behalf of various Terran and Martian corporations, each with its faintly menacing acronym, block pixel logo, and tree of unlockable perks. OK, so there’s some kind of backstory mystery to solve as well. But think of the parts!

The first available faction is Cyberacme, who both endow you with a perk that lets you identify loot faster during matches, and encumber you with a Cortana, of sorts – a sinister disembodied head called Oni who invites you to consider her “a friend… one you don’t yet remember.” Press X to doubt.

The server slam’s opening Perimeter map is like a bunch of smashed iMacs left out in the drizzle. What look like huge, hazard-yellow or electric-blue capacitors and transformers poke from scree and coarse vegetation. It’s hard to decide whether the desolate ‘natural’ geography is lying on top of the circuitry, or vice versa. This is a fleshless world, at first glance, but there’s a Gigery lustre to the map’s curved and gelatinous interiors, with bold coloured patches that fit together like some anatomical diagram.

There are also pustulant, scuttling lifeforms that call to mind Halo’s Flood, living in scarlet egg sacs in the crevices, waiting to ooze up a wall and ambush you while you’re trading shots with the robots. You blast a few of those critters, use your Destiny-style specials to slaughter a squad of bot reinforcements, and then it’s time to open a crate of some kind and goggle at yet more doodads. Your inventory soon becomes a microcosm for the scatter of components that is the map as a whole.

Again, there is a backstory to pin all this down. You glean it from the coffee mugs and still-active terminals, dotted around the Perimeter facility. I’m definitely getting a Forerunner vibe from the premise of an abandoned colony vessel. I’m sure there’s more to those ravening native lifeforms than how they splatter in the gaze of an LMG.

Still, I’m finding Marathon most compelling right now as an accidental visual metaphor for my feeling that the world has been conquered by a company once known mainly for being dumped at the altar by the Dreamcast. Nowadays, worlds may burgeon or disappear when Nvidia flaps its wings, even as the use case for its principal product remains strongly in doubt. Marathon’s reboot has the same festering Chaos energy: this is a universe of flamboyant high technology and product design that is rotting in the rain, eating itself alive. You can slam those servers yourself via Steam.