Timber Rush is about numbers going up in the crudest way imaginable, a clicker game that barely even features clicking, in which you move your woodcutter side to side as increasing numbers of increasingly silly logs fly around the screen.
Over the weekend, players were able to progress the ARG far enough to reveal new information about Cryo Archive, the "endgame" level of Bungie's sci-fi shooter that is set on the actual Marathon ship first featured in the original '90s trilogy of games. To hop into this yet-to-be-unlocked area, players will need to reach rank 25 and have "established connections" with all factions.
During my week-long binge, I played games that paused their own tutorials to run ads. I saw endless fake X icons and banners that hid the close button under the iPhone's Dynamic Island. Now, I'm not against ads, but I hate it when they feel like a penalty. I'm a gamer, and from what I've seen, PC and console games integrate ads much better. If mobile devs followed suit, mobile games might finally climb out of the mess they're in.
Games did not suddenly become "worse." Games adapted. Attention got tired, schedules got tighter, and competition for free time turned brutal. A ten-minute gap now has to fight against messages, videos, and endless feeds. In that environment, long-form sessions still exist, but short sessions often win because they respect reality instead of demanding a perfect evening. That shift is visible everywhere, from mobile puzzlers to competitive titles and even casino-style experiences where a quick crore win feeling is part of the appeal.
In Marathon, if you drop a piece of gear for a teammate and you all extract successfully, you get that gear back. This is intended to make it hard to trade gear with other players permanently, which could likely be used by some to sell rare loot. It also encourages players to share guns with squadmates to ensure everyone gets out alive.
Seasons in Marathon last about three months, and each season will bring new content and features that change the way you master survival, grow your power floor, and progress through a season. Marathon's living universe and gameplay will continue to evolve across seasons, fueled by your feedback and your impact on the world of Tau Ceti as you uncover what happened to the lost colony and on the Marathon ship.
There were lots of good stuff in this week's Convergence Showcase too, including another peek at Mouse: P.I. for Hire as we get to see one of the game's bosses for the first time. This first-person shooter with rubber-hose animation is set to arrive on March 19. There were other welcome announcements for me in this showcase. First, there was a release date for the Zelda-inspired adventure Gecko Gods.
might be the most ambitious game I've played on the Playdate. It's all about perspective: You turn the handheld's crank to rotate your viewpoint of the bite-size 3D landscapes, which lets you peek around corners to find solutions to various puzzles. On a device with a 1-bit, black-and-white display, the miniature worlds feel miraculous, like little dioramas you can spin around in your hands. But the most impressive part is the puzzles that will have you twisting your brain as much as the crank.
The best new co-op games are those that do something a bit different, offering more than a single-player experience with another player thoughtlessly tacked on. These multiplayer games account for groups of friends all wanting their own role, with a shared goal in sight and plenty of chaos on the path to getting there.
Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds was a pretty solid release for Sega in 2025. Certainly the fans seemed chuffed about it, and the critic reviews were good, too. Indeed, Sega's latest financial results are quick to praise the game's Steam user rating and its Metacritic score. But it turns out, they aren't quite so happy with the sales numbers. The document confirms what we heard at the end of 2025: Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds has sold 1-million+ copies.