There are so many reasons I should be excited for Marathon, and many of them are aesthetic ones. I have a particular weakness for the stark, colorful, striking designs of its vectorheart-inspired art style that pairs cold sterility with bold, borderline-obnoxious color intensity. It’s like someone built a game from the desktop wallpaper I had—and the posters I wish I could afford—as an early-2000s preteen.
There’s just one problem: I’m not an extraction shooter guy. Luckily, thanks to the demo for Cicadamata, another shooter has stepped in for me to pin all my aesthetic anticipation on.
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If you want proof that Cicadamata and Marathon share some visual sensibilities, any doubts you might have will be dispelled as soon as you look at its Steam page description and face the assault of flickering, animated text and pseudocode littered with ominous existential phraseology and computerized menace.
But rather than walking the extraction shooter road that Bungie’s taken with Marathon, Cicadamata is more like Overstimulation: The Game. It’s a time trial FPS a la Neon White, prioritizing precise maneuvering and shooting to achieve dead sprint speed.
You play as Fawn-A2, “chosen for enlistment” as a Cicada combat unit “due to unforeseen circumstances in your previous life” and tasked with “acquiring 4 cores from all spheres” of the Cascade while eliminating threats using a cybershotgun that may or may not be intelligent and may or may not be some kind of digital antichrist.
I know very little of what any of that actually means, to be clear, but I know that it all sounds sick and I love when it’s flashed at me on-screen in the world’s most stylish, most menacing powerpoint. That’s sort of the deal here.
In practice, it looks like stringing together Fawn-A2’s triple jumps, air dashes, and diving stomps while juggling their individual recharge mechanics to navigate self-contained shooter maps, all while blasting hostile polygons and collecting each level’s aforementioned cores. Throughout, you’re bombarded with UI elements, audio cues, and automated messages advising that “if feeling in danger, repeat this affirmation and keep pressing on: I AM OKAY. THE AIR IS JUST HEAVY TODAY”—primarily just to make you feel a certain kind of way.
If that sounds overwhelming: It is! I’m awful at it. I’ve been stumbling through levels in a daze, doing my best just to keep from tumbling off a monochrome platform to my death. And while clean runs through a level feel excellent and I’m enjoying the steady satisfaction of my own slow improvement, I’ll confess I’m mostly here for the vibes.
It will be divisive. You’ll probably know whether you’ll love it or you’ll hate it as soon as you see it. But Cicadamata is one of the most shameless, indulgent, devoted articulations of an aesthetic I’ve seen on Steam in years, and every gratuitous bit of interface design that flickers into being is one I’m thrilled to be assailed by.
The Cicadamata demo is available on Steam until March 5. The full game will launch sometime later this year.
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