Rushmark

Rushmark is a speedrunning platformer where one wrong touch ends the run. You pilot a neural-linked combat droid through short, lethal courses staged for an underworld betting circuit, moving fast enough that enemies become part of the racing line instead of obstacles beside it. A learned run takes under thirty seconds. A failed one restarts instantly, and you will fail a lot.

ONE DASH. NO SECOND CHANCES.

The whole move set fits on one hand: run, jump, eight-way dash, wall kick, area burst. No combo tree, nothing to unlock, no upgrades. The depth is entirely in how they combine at speed.

The dash is the game. It's your fastest movement, your weapon, and a limited resource. On the ground it recharges in under a second, and dashing off the floor never costs you the one you get in the air. In the air you get just that one, and once it's spent, waiting won't bring it back. Killing will. Land a dash strike and the dash refunds instantly, cooldown and all, which turns a line of enemies into a ladder, a chain, a way across a gap with no floor under it.

So enemies aren't rooms to clear. They're geometry. Blockers sit on the fast line. Ranged units make you commit early. Armoured anchors wait under a ceiling too low to jump, and only open to an area burst. Every one of them is placed as part of the racing line, not next to it.

SEASON ONE: TEN COURSES, TEN DIFFERENT IDEAS

Each course is built around something the last one didn't do: a wall-kick gauntlet you cross without touching the ground, a course that descends instead of climbing, one played almost entirely in the air, one that's pure reaction timing. Rated one to three stars, so you know what you're walking into.

Rushmark runs in seasons, and these ten are season one. When a season closes the ladder resets and the next one opens with courses of its own. Season two is already finished and shipping inside the game behind a locked card in the menu: five more courses and two more Marathon routes, out in December.

There is no health bar and there are no lives. Touch a hazard and the droid disintegrates on the spot. Enemy fire won't kill you outright. It knocks you off your line and drops you, which in most of these courses amounts to the same thing. Restarting takes no fade, no confirmation and no menu; you're moving again before you've finished being annoyed.

THREE WAYS TO RUN THE CIRCUIT

• Courses: ten fixed tracks. Marker splits show you exactly where the time went.

• Survival: an endless randomised chain drawn from forty hand-built sections, and the whole world runs faster the longer you last. Ranked on how far you get.

• Marathons: courses 1-5, 6-10 or all ten, back to back in one unbroken run. A halfway checkpoint catches you. The clock does not forgive you for needing it.

EVERYONE ELSE IS ALREADY ON THE BOARD

Every finish uploads the moment you cross the line. Each course, each Marathon and Survival carry their own Steam leaderboard, and one aggregate season ranking scores your standing across all of them, so a rival taking a single course off you costs you season position, whether you played that day or not.

Pull any entry off a leaderboard and race that player's actual recorded run, or watch it play out wearing the skin and trail they had equipped when they set it. Beat your own ghost first. Then go and find someone worth chasing.

Seasons close and the ladder starts again, so a standing is something you hold rather than something you banked. Season standing pays out in skins and nothing else, permanent once earned, never a gameplay advantage. Nobody buys speed here. Play in launch week and the FIRST HEAT skin is yours for good.

THE CIRCUIT

The underworld runs a betting operation, and you're the stock it runs on. Every course is a rigged race staged for people making money on whether you make it. The droid isn't equipment and it isn't a power-up. It's life support, and losing it is why the fiction takes a death seriously even though the game hands you another attempt in under a second.

That's all the story there is. The game moves too fast to tell you more, and it would rather you were already running.

IN THE BOX

• Ten timed courses, endless Survival, and three Marathons, the longest all ten back to back

• A tutorial that teaches every technique by making you do it, not by describing it

• Personal-best ghosts, marker splits, best time and best score per course

• Steam leaderboards, downloadable rival ghosts, achievements and Cloud saves

• A season ranking across every board

• Cosmetic skins earned by rank, trails earned by beating par times, and FIRST HEAT for launch-week players

• Full controller support and fully rebindable keys

• A built-in music player: swap playlists, build your own, skip a track without leaving the run