Destiny 2 haunts me. Originally impressed by its colorful new maps and the increasingly intricate quests embossed on them, I'm now worn down and empty—somehow even more than by the end of my time with the first game. The logic of its spaces perplexes and exhausts with more cynical polish than before, creating a quicksand of loot that welcomes you inside before promptly snuffing out whatever joy was left in your heart. "I wear the chain I forged in life,” says Jacob Marley in Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?” I forged my own chain in Destiny 2, an elaborate tangle of engrams, armor mods, exotic ornaments, legendary shaders, and character emblems, and I assure you while it might look strange to any normal person it's instantly recognizable to anyone who's played the game. Dickens' Britain fueled imperial expansion and industrial growth through child labor and colonial oppression while the spoils of this arrangement were enjoyed by a privileged few. Embedded deep within this system are the two central cogs of A Christmas Carol, Scrooge and Cratchit, a banker and his clerk, tasked with keeping tally over the riches flowing through their small corner of the world. The lie of Dickens' story is that the Scrooges of the world can save the Cratchits simply by becoming better, more enlightened people, but there's truth at least in the idea that people can save themselves, however briefly, by eschewing their work for a day and taking stock of a life, and the people, beyond it. Wealth accumulation provides the propulsive force in Destiny 2 as well. Other people exist in your game but not for their own sake. They are coworkers, not friends. Your options are two-fold: resist the game and revel in its beauty or punch the timecard and play it like a slot machine masked as virtuous meritocracy. Everyone knows they should do the former but it's harder than it looks. Like Scrooge or any other vessel for commerce, the incentive structure and reward scheme are dehumanizing but insinuate themselves into the fabric of the game's reality so subtly it's easy not to recognize how imprisoned you've become before it's too late. At some point every Destiny player will find herself staring off into the virtual distance, maybe at the clouds as they catch the light from a sunset or a building of tangled steel and crumbling concrete ornately rendered but impossible to ever visit. Tired of shooting things and collecting other things, they'll rest for a moment. They might even invoke the game's sitting emote to pull the camera back while their Guardian catches her breath. During these moments Destiny 2's world feels weighty and almost complete. Its promise of a sprawling sci-fi terrain upon which you can scavenge, hunt, and harvest the litany of proper nouns sprinkled throughout it seems realized. Upon first entering a new area you take in the sights. Then stuff happens to distract you: a glowing beacon asks you to climb to a random spot on the map or maybe a giant space pod falls from the sky and births aliens for you to destroy, cleansing the palette and preparing you to be amazed by the shapes and colors swirling around you all over again. Every once in awhile, though, something that doesn't belong turns up. Another Guardian. Another you. It’s a reminder that while you are in Destiny 2 you are not of it, and with that the illusion begins to break down. This other person running by, jumping overhead, or speeding away on a space bike has, probably, an unreadable collection of symbols hovering above their head, as well as a number indicating how long they've been around. They'll also be clad in varying levels of interesting clothing and might have guns you recognize and a few you don't, a realization that's usually followed by pangs of regret that after hundreds of hours of playing there are still things you haven't managed to collect and which, by virtue of this fact, you feel must surely be better than the stuff you already have. This is the second most common experience in Destiny 2: seeing another player and immediately coveting the toys dangling from their person. You can't communicate with the other person in words, at least not in a way that's easy enough that you'll ever actually try. And while you could try any number of the emotes you've purchased with one form of space dust or another it's unlikely this stranger will ever stop for long enough to recognize and interpret, let alone respond to, the friendly gesture. This is what it means to be alone in Destiny 2, but alone in a way that's completely different from the breathtaking solitude of staring off into the skyboxes and pondering what lies beyond. Whatever joys there are in the self-imposed exile through which many people in Destiny 2 play the game (and I venture it is most people), they are immediately upended by the sight of another person and all the material markers they bring with them. Guardians don't have reflections in the game, only shadows which they occasionally cast against the rusted, dying world when facing away from the light. It's not until you see another player that you really see yourself then, and a new, spiritually perilous course is charted. What had previously been enough, the soft tug of the aim-assist as you dragged your reticle across an alien's head, the delightful twinkle of a glowing rock as it popped from the alien's corpse, and the exquisite control with which you can hop and glide through the world, now feel like childish things to be cast off in the pursuit of more meaningful work. Namely, the continuous accrual of more space junk and the endless toil of brokering meetups with other players to help in attaining it. You grow up fast in Destiny 2. For the players who came from Destiny 1 the patterns are too familiar to stay fresh for long and for those dipping their toes in for the first time, the second game is so streamlined it runs its course shockingly fast, like a water slide built with the sole intent of spitting you out the other side as fast as possible. Everything is more plentiful in Destiny 2's world and most of it is fungible. Where players previously bartered for the bulk of their inventory with a currency called marks, tokens now rule the day, small coins with unique symbols on them that can be cashed in at various carnival vendors for the random contents inside an endless supply of mystery boxes. Just about everything you collect in the game can be recycled and reinvested back into these lottery systems. Bungie no doubt thought organizing the game this way would help every player continue to feel invested in Destiny's transactional world, whether they were a newcomer or a regular, but the end result is a system that feels somehow both inescapable and inadequate, like investing in a 401k. Where being a space clerk of sorts felt secondary, if not completely optional in Destiny 1, it's a defining characteristic of Destiny 2. A game which succeeds most when letting you fly off cliffs and lob grenades into the abyss below like a 24th-century cowboy has retooled itself into an unwitting approximation of satirical bean counting sims like Cookie Clicker and Paper Clips, Inc. The nature of this discontent might be effectively bracketed (as was often possible in Destiny 1, at least just enough) if it weren't for the mundane ways it creeps into the most basic facets of playing the game. When I started Destiny 2 I cherished every new purple and yellow toy that dropped out of the ether. When I ran out of room on my person, I started dumping the excess into my vault, intent on sorting out the really good stuff from the just okay stuff later on. Over a hundred hours later I've turned my back on the vault, too exhausted and overwhelmed to comb back through its contents. I now think of it less like a safety deposit box from a Hollywood thriller filled with precious gems and intriguing secrets than a mausoleum. The new items I do get I often break down in order to reserve room for even newer ones. I spend almost as much time doing this, sitting paralyzed as I stare at menu graphics comparing two different guns or helmets or pairs of boots, as anything else in the game these days. I've become a prisoner of Destiny 2's economy, grinding bits of it into smaller bits as it in turn grinds me down into something unrecognizable; a pale ghost with none of the passion or freedom of that person who once spent five minutes admiring the gassy waves on one of Jupiter's moon. Destiny 2 is about your Guardian losing their Light and trying to get it back again, but it is best at that first part. I've played Destiny around the holidays every year since it came out. It's comfort food, like cold eggnog and warm cookies, and the dazzling world with all of its nonsensical but familiar rituals envelops me like a blanket near a fireplace. It's been harder and harder to do this as the game's become more atomized, though. I'm less the inter-planetary vagrant now and more of a glorified ledger made flesh, a list of numbers and symbols that don't add up to anything. In December of 2014 I spent Christmas Eve with a close friend huddled behind a steel plate deep under a Russian junkyard fighting for our lives against a screeching witch from another galaxy counting each bullet as it left my machine gun, hoping the remaining rounds were enough to see us through. This year I'm swapping tokens to watch the number next to my name slowly tick up. The Tower is supposed to be Destiny's version of Cheers, the bar where "everybody knows your name, and they're always glad you came." In reality, neither of these things is true. At best we're the extras in the background sipping water with food coloring in it out of dirty glasses. Destiny 2 starts by kicking you out on the street and ends by triumphantly inviting you back in, but while some of the decor changes and the bar’s been wiped down overnight your fundamental relationship to it remains unchanged. Looking out at the other players buzzing across its surfaces you find yourself surrounded not by friends but spectres drifting from one oblivion to another. "The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went," writes Dickens as the ghost of Scrooge's former partner departs. "Every one of them wore chains like Marley’s Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments) were linked together; none were free." Dickens goes on to recount how Scrooge recognizes one of the ghosts floating past, an old man in a white waistcoat with a big iron safe shackled to his ankle. The man is sobbing uncontrollably over the sight of an indigent woman and her baby below. The ghost can't do anything but pity her and be overwhelmed with regret. While the sight of phantoms swooping in and out of Destiny 2's Tower is familiar to the point of being unremarkable, the sight of any of them howling over their predicament, distraught over the chains they've forged in the game, is not. They might be too distracted to think so, or too satisfied with the colors and orientation of their latest widget to care. The constraints of the game do them no favors either. For all its aspirations to being a truly multiplayer game, Destiny 2 hasn't progressed in any meaningful way toward helping people forge genuine connections outside of its futile rat race. Like two people admiring one another's classic cars on the highway, feeling both proud and anxious, all they can ultimately do in the end is drive off alone. In real life, of course, you could roll the window down and speak a few words, but in Destiny 2 not even this small human gesture is possible. A pre-canned dance animation isn’t enough. At the end of A Christmas Carol, Scrooge tries to salvage his life by paying for a lavish dinner and sharing it with his coworker's family. Notably, this sort of path toward redemption is closed off in Bungie's game. For all of the shiny space trash I've spent what feels like a lifetime collecting, I can't even share it with anyone. People can look at my museum of artifacts but never touch them. They are all locked to me and me alone, a ponderous chain indeed. Guardians are meant to be corpses reanimated by the light, and for moments in Destiny 1 they might have been. In Destiny 2 they are only corpses which no amount of light could bring back from the dead.

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Ethan Gach is a staff writer at Kotaku. Follow him on Twitter.