I do have my own "bad take" regarding the visual elements of new Marathon.
Original Marathon was for its time at a normal level of gore, but by today standards it was very gory. Far moreso than a lot of retro shooter games, though less than the modern Doom games.
People did not just bleed a little, grab their chest and fall over. The game used different death animations dependent on cause of death. They were turned into red mulch and finished their explosion animation dozens or hundreds of meters away from the point where they were explode-shot. They had entrails and offal and bone and their death screams were recorded by a man who was also a lead singer in a band. People would kill civilians with the flamethrower just to hear the unique flame death scream. The video documentary of the college boys who coded the game showed them high fiving after triggering a mass explosion of a bunch of different people with a grenade shot, and the word "carnage" was very prominent both in game and in marketing for it.
If you've only played Doom (original, unmodded, when it only had 1 death animation per enemy), or haven't played any boomer shooters before, and are interested in trying Marathon out–pay some attention to how people die. The humans have two or three different death animations depending on whether a weapon made an enemy (or innocent citizen) bleed, burn, or burst apart–this is more attention than was paid to some of the alien enemies, and in Marathon 2 the multiplayer human enemy death animations are really very good. The means of violence generated a specific visual consequence, and human blood is specifically an important visual and gameplay element because if anyone bleeds anything other than red then they are bombs in human form and will run up to you and explode in a shower of entrails that will also take away half of your health and kill anyone nearby.
Original Marathon had zero (0) female sprites, only an omnipresent disembodied feminine artificial intelligence character with no associated image at all. There was a retro style game whose creator said he wanted to carry over the visual language and gameplay of Original Marathon, but used primarily female-presenting (mostly femboy) sprites–it was called "Citadel" and most of its reviews in English mention how deeply uncomfortable, ero-guro-esque and stomach churning the introduction of female characters to the charnel house of a Marathon-styl
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