Master Chief, dead in space. That’s how Halo Infinite starts, for all serious purposes. Dropped into the void between the stars by a crusading warrior with an undefined mission, Master Chief floats, systems down, for a full six months as his entire species is torn apart across a battlefield. Then he’s resurrected, brought back to life, by a man who wants this first-person shooter hero to fire like an arrow back to human-controlled space. 

Master Chief won’t do that. He looks out the window and sees a Halo facility, the ringworlds that have penned in his destiny for 20 years, and decides to continue “the mission” by landing on it and fighting through ever-more-complex enemies in search of some ill-defined goal that the player isn’t let in on until right before it becomes plot critical.

Our shooter games like to make a lot of goal-seeking. Since System Shock 2, game developers have found the dual layers of mechanical goals and narrative drive too compelling to avoid making them clever. You thought you were just doing a nice thing, but you were really fulfilling a secret plan. Worse, you never knew what you were really doing the entire time. BioShock has you kindly complete tasks without your knowing why. Spec Ops: The Line understands that it never made much sense to begin with, and then runs with it, asserting and assuming Walker has shattered across the desert into a cluster of whatever rationalist figure he might have been.

Even if it comes off as too clever for its own good every time, the well is never all that dry because the goal-oriented nature of these games, the idea that the pursuit of your goals is always best chased by punching holes through the heads of your enemies, is too silly to take fully on-face, no matter how touched we are by the death of our wonderful friend Soap MacTavish. The absurdity of all of this has never been more finely put than in Darius Kazemi’s “You Were Hallucinating The Whole Time,” whose procedural rhetorical statements can probably be divined simply by reading the title.

Master Chief, too, is always driven down the path of videogamic necessity by waypoint markers and narrative contrivance. Even in Infinite’s open world there are still clear goals, clear enemies, clear mission stakes. He’s not hallucinating, and he’s not being tricked, but it’s easy to see the echo of these mechanics when "go here," "kill this," "take that," "blow this up" is the sum total of a character’s existence in the world. What’s the space between Master Chief and BioShock’s Jack, the character-who-isn’t, who exists purely to be led?

Infinite gives us a brief interaction, a point of thought, a moment where time will not progress until we make an input that transforms a listless Master Chief into the creature we’ve inhabited so many times before: insert chip.

Master Chief looks for a weapon and finds Weapon, the younger clone of his longtime controller Cortana, whose betrayal set the stage for Master Chief’s own space death sentence. Weapon has supposedly killed Cortana; upon the completion of her mission, she was supposed to self-destruct, but it simply did not happen. Faced with this, having spent years in a machine war, having seen his closest ally betray him, against all logic Master Chief pops Weapon into a chip which he, then, pops into his own head.

A way of thinking this is through its form as a narrative contrivance. Playing the sum total of Halo Infinite, top to bottom, makes it extremely clear that developer 343 just desperately needs to reset the stage on the Halo games and get Master Chief, Cortana, and some support characters out of the deep science fiction, Greg Bear backstory-fueled, hyperplot they’re trapped in. Master Chief, Cortana, a ringworld (echoing: man, woman, lighthouse). 

Another way of thinking this is as another twist on the always-too-clever move that mediates the relationship between the game design and the narrative scaffolding that shows up so often in these games. Master Chief isn’t just recruiting an ally. Master Chief is totally the same as BioShock Jack with the wool pulled over his eyes and a genetic program that keeps him doing whatever someone kindly asks him to do.

No, instead Master Chief is someone in search of a master himself. The human space organization is no longer around to tell him his next goals. His only chance at finding some kind of meaning in his post-death experiences is to summon up a controller wherever he can find one. Infinite seems to bottom out Master Chief’s character in the most nihilistic way, that he truly has nothing without the goal-determining powers of another person who mediates between his own senses and the world around him to tell him what to do. Not a Weapon but a daemon; not a weapon but a gnostic Great Adversary, holding the world at bay to keep perception itself clean and ordered. Assault rifle rounds go here so that we can fetch dongle for big goal achievement. 

Not hallucinating the whole time, but hoping for someone to step in so that pure, unmediated reality is not streaming into the dead-yet-living creature that towers over the rest of his species and punches holes in the world around him. Infinite is a legitimation screed for giving up the self, of holding onto the things that hold you, a paean for a titanium coffin and a designer that drags the bones inside of it across an open world in lockstep timing with perfect game loop pacing. 

Faced with the opportunity to be Master Chief without Cortana, a Master Chief with freedom in an open world, Infinite skitters back into a cave, the very limits of what make this entire operation work laid bare like sandblasted concrete. At the end, Weapon takes the name Cortana. Master Chief says we have to finish the fight. Whatever the interregnum was, it’s gone now. Unmastered no more, never again.

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Cameron Kunzelman is a critic. You can follow him on Twitter or listen to his game studies podcast. His book on speculation and video games is out later this year.