"My slumber was disturbed by a mighty roar heard across worlds. On every world, a CRISIS. On every alternative, a new apocalypse. A doomsday. A last judgement. A conclusion that never comes but continues to arrive. An endless EVENT."

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When I first wrote about Halo Infinite, I described it as where you need to go to find an avatar of the Modern AAA game experience. Having now finished the campaign, I would like to expand that further to include the modern media landscape as a whole in 2022.

Halo Infinite begins without beginning, and ends without ending. It is an eternal middle, starting after everything is established and stopping before anything is concluded, a promise of content to come, an eternal conflict Master Chief wages to stop Halo from being fully reborn, that in it's waging produces a thousand tiny moments of HaloTM content to enjoy. Or, perhaps, not even to enjoy; to simply consume, one after another, turning blue icons grey until there are no blue icons that remain, until the next feast of Blue Icons arises, until the wheel turns again.

In a world where each day, we are presented with news headlines demonstrating time and time again that the pillars that make up our modern world are in fact the very same thing choking the life out of it, it is perhaps unsurprising that the Shared Universe, previously the niche domain of geek franchise fodder that produced such delightful ephemera as the Yuuzhan Vong or Faction Paradox, has emerged as the definitive modern storytelling mode. How else do we justify the obscene contradictions of the world in which we live than by performing necromantic rituals on dead worlds and stories, ensuring they stretch on forever and ever, insisting upon their own existences far beyond memory and relevancy or even their own endings. A world where marvel superheroes can face their Endgame and keep going, a world where The Dead Speak, and, of course, a world where Master Chief continues to fight the good fight forevermore, clearing outposts on the infinite sprawl of Zeta Halo.

Do you remember Halo 5: Guardians? Halo Infinite, hopes you do and do not, at the exact same time. That game happened, to be sure - the illusion of the Shared World cannot allow something like a game with a number attached to simply Not Occur without shattering the shared delusion of meaning and import that continuity represents - but it was followed by a phantom Halo 6 that never came out, a game that resolved the conflict with The Created that Halo 5 set up, a game where Master Chief had his tearful final confrontation with Cortana, a game that properly introduced The Banished and established them as an equal threat to the UNSC, a game that conveniently resets everything to it's most comfortably anthromorphic and predictable states. The green guy and the aliens on the ringworld, the rebel alliance and the empire. On and on it goes. Halo 6 exists now only as a wound that Infinite spends the entirety of it's runtime picking at, a gap in space and time that exists only to be filled in by content, audio logs and and lore podcasts and theory videos, Content upon Content, nothing but Content in this blasted land. Master Chief emerges from this black hole of a Game That Never Was to find Halo in the process of rebooting itself, and wearily sets himself to prevent that goal. Bereft of advancement, regressing to the Iconic Version of himself, and aided always by a false simulacra made by the image Cortana represented in prior games, against a nameless, faceless enemy, literally called The Endless, always out of sight and out of firing range, dangled forever in front of the Chief as he runs along on the hamster wheel of Halo's corpse forevermore, listening to the voices of ghosts explaining what happened in games that never were, all the while, a Final, True and Ultimate Threat hangs just out of reach, an Empty Hand holding an Energy Sword of Damocles that will never, ever fall.

This is Halo: Infinite. The promise of ephemera, imagery, and writing that once Meant Something, that had cultural and artistic significance emerging from the time it was created, placed into a vacuum-sealed Platform to sustain itself in perpetuity, without beginning or end, a mobius loop greedily devouring it's own tail because there remains nothing else. An existential nightmare existence without progress or retreat, where Master Chief fights forever against an enemy he cannot ever defeat, yet cannot ever defeat him in turn. Where the only victory to be found is the perpetuity of the world that Is, stretching on forever and ever. The Covenant can become The Banished, the Empire can become The First Order, Dark Souls can become Elden Ring, Overwatch can become Overwatch 2, but nothing can ever actually change. Nothing can actually evolve, not even combat. The world can never be allowed to end, to die, to allow new flowers to sprout from it's corpse as it becomes a part of the earth that spawns it. No matter what happens, Master Chief must always be on a Halo, shooting a grunt with a battle rifle.

And it's still fun to shoot a grunt with a battle rifle. But it's been over 20 years since Combat was said to Evolve. When will the war end? Will it ever, or are we trapped in a perpetual conflict with an enemy that is both tremendously weak and cowardly and infinitely powerful and terrifying? When will the galaxy be at peace? When will the covenant finally be defeated? When will Durandal look back on the world that was, and wonder who we were? How many more Ancient Evils remain to be defeated? How many more Banished/Covenants exist to be broken? How many more Grunts are there to be shot with my Battle Rifle? When will the credits roll, when will the screen fade to black, when will anything come to an actual, true end?

I don't know. But I know I'll probably play the DLC. Because I don't know the way out of this world any more than you do. And at the end of the day, bereft of anything better, I'll keep shooting grunts in the face with a battle rifle.

Three stars.

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"'In the End'? Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends."

if you want to have a perfect encapsulation of the modern state of triple-A video games, then the free-to-play multiplayer mode of Halo Infinite is where you need to find it.

loading up this game is kind of an upsetting experience. the UI is absolutely terrible, just like Halo 5 the game is missing series-staple features like Forge, game modes like Infection, Assault, Juggernaut (this isn't even all of it, the game will release without a campaign co-op mode for the first time in series history, which to me would be like a fighting game being released without a training mode), locking basic customization features behind an obscenely miserly battlepass grind that doles out a drip feed of additions to a customization suite that no longer deigns to let you change the color of your character freely, made more insidious by the game itself placing more emphasis on individual player expression than any game in the series before it, what with each player using their own colors even in team game modes and a roll call at the beginning of every match to show off your cosmetics and give shitty little kids an opportunity to call you a Default.

however. once you're in the game? once you're haloing? oh man. oh buddy. it's fucking halo!!! halo just rules, the place it sits between more classic boomer shooters and more modern "boots on the ground" fare has always given it a distinct niche, one that rewards strategy and knowledge of its systems in ways that it's contemporaries simply don't, whilst offering a vast enough sandbox of intersecting weapons, vehicles, and ephemera that the game becomes an engine for creating hilarious stories to share with your friends. why else do you think the theater mode exists? (well, existed lol) just on a visceral game feel level this is by far 343's most successful iteration of the sandbox to date, excising much of the bizarre decisions that inflicted their Halo 4 efforts while still carving out it's own niche within a series that still maintains it's older efforts to play at your leisure through the master chief collection. it's very early days yet so we don't know exactly how balancing, map design, and things like that are gonna shake out in the long run, but just on a base level? this game is such a blast. two decades of iteration and tweaking of this formula have created a game that is like kinesthetic ambrosia, and it's refreshing to play a western modern-AAA game with visibly absurd money behind it that feels consciously designed, y'know?

i love the master chief collection for offering so much halo so readily, but the fact that it offers so much is kind of why it always feels depopulated and muted despite having a healthy player base. everything is so decentralized that there isn't really A Halo that everyone is playing, y'know? and that's what excites me about Infinite. a free-to-play halo game that everyone can play together and enjoy...once they get through the actively depressing menus lmao. even takes up a very normal and sensible amount of space on your hard drive!! i don't have to plan my life around having halo installed!! it's a miracle!!!

halo night with the squad...it's been a long time without you, my friend...