First things first: Titanium Court is the funniest game I’ve ever played. Baby Steps, that hilarious take on open-world level design and traversal, released last year, is perhaps the only game that even comes close. I wasn’t surprised to find out that AP Thomson, the solo developer behind Titanium Court, has worked on several projects with Bennett Foddy, one of the main developers of Baby Steps. They share a similar comic sensibility and a playful, experimental approach to game design.
The writing in Titanium Court – a strange and joyful game that has captured my heart – is full of incredible in-jokes, creative callbacks, and a sublime sense of self-awareness. It’s simply bursting at the seams with life, vivacity, and wit, much like one of Shakespeare’s most exuberant plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, whose fictional world it tangentially draws upon. Indeed, I think it takes its name from Titania, Queen of the Fairies, a character from the play. There’s also a decidedly unhelpful character named Puck (look out for them!)—not to mention the rest of the court’s vivacious community of fairies—as well as some other lovely little references to Shakespeare’s timeless comedy. From the moment you find yourself in the surreal and uncanny world of Titanium Court (both the place and the game), you are taken on a wondrous ride full of surprise, laughter, and shapeshifting magic, which I think even the Bard himself would merrily doff his velvet cap to.
The writing weaves its charming spell through all aspects of this mixed-genre mash-up of mirth and mayhem. Heck, even the tutorialisation is brilliantly written and highly playful. Describing the game as a roguelite-match 3-tower defence-strategy game, although quite a mouthful, would only be half the story. Not to say that it doesn’t meticulously combine these elements into a satisfying package which, even without the allure of the lively storytelling and mind-bending metafiction, would form a decidedly moreish little game.
The core gameplay loop (not including the narrative sections in between runs) consists of three distinct stages. First is the match-3 section, in which you align topographical features of a map, a 7×7 tile-based grid, in order to collect resources and strategically position your court tile in relation to enemy courts. Next comes the planning for the tower defence stage. Here you assign roles to soldiers, farmers and other specialist fairies for the upcoming ‘war’, which then plays out procedurally, hopefully in line with your meticulous planning.
The music and sound design are fantastic throughout, but the main theme that plays during these battle scenes is an unforgettable earworm of a tune. And the cheeky celebratory windows that pop up when you defeat an enemy are glorious. If the war is executed successfully, your court moves on to the next map, and you work your way towards a final boss area, buying upgrades and honing your strategies along the way. If you fail in a run, you go back to the start. This is, after all, a roguelite, but a rather unusual one.
Firstly, metaprogression is kind and innovative. Saying too much about the latter would spoil the fun of discovery, but let’s just say to always take the option to listen to a song when the chance is offered. What I can say is that highly customisable difficulty sliders are gradually introduced, giving you the option to add some ‘comfort’ to your runs or, alternatively, to increase the ‘strife’ level (no thanks!).
I found the comfort sliders most welcome. This is quite a difficult game, requiring complex forward planning and strategic thinking, which are not my forte. The game mechanics are simple to pick up, but within this simplicity lies deep complexity. There is also an element of luck involved – both in the match-3 and the tower defence mechanics, specifically the strategising parts (the best-laid plans sometimes go awry) – that might prove slightly frustrating for some. I suspect fans of strategy games will manage just fine, but for newbies like myself, runs can fall apart in the blink of an eye. Once the planning stages are over, the outcome of battles is literally out of your hands, and watching helplessly as your court is obliterated can be quite vexing. However, like everything else in the game, this is very much built into the design and becomes part of the mischievous metafictional framework.
Moreover, I never felt frustrated for long, not only because I enjoyed the gameplay (bad as I am at it) – the ‘gamey’ parts of games about games still have to be fun – but also because I was always excited to get back to the storytelling sections. Exploring the court at night (the ‘war’ plays out during the day), and interacting with its fairy denizens, is always delightful. This aspect of the game reminded me of Hades: a roguelite where failure is beautifully counterbalanced by the stellar writing and engaging storytelling between runs. Unlike the beautiful hand-drawn art in Hades, the minimalist pixel art in Titanium Court requires a little imagination to fill in the gaps, leaving space for the player-reader to project onto its simple – and yet still somehow flamboyant – canvas. Exploring this strange, visually spare place and meeting its peculiar inhabitants is always joyful.
Both the characterisation and the dialogue are superb, always chock full of exuberance, cheeky deflections and mischievously knowing repartee. The sheer amount of dialogue is impressive, especially as it’s all the work of a solo developer.
The story itself, of a missing queen, and the role of the protagonist/player in the game – will they beat the game and/or escape the fictional world of the court? – slowly unravels itself over many, many runs and attempts to master the highly strategic gameplay. It twists and turns and reflects back upon itself in delightfully original ways. Indeed, it’s perhaps in its deployment of metafictional elements that this shiny gem of a game shines most brightly.
It is forever playing with the idea that it is a video game, a piece of fiction. Now, I’ve played quite a few games that haven’t quite pulled this off, but Titanium Court manages it with such a light, expert touch, right from the moment when the curtains open at the beginning, and the announcer introduces the ‘performance’. These pink pixelated theatre curtains frame the game throughout your playthrough, reminding you that this ‘whole world is a stage’. A play that you are playing. Echoes of Shakespeare and the theatre gently reverberate as you go about your court business.
The art design is equally self-reflexive. The extravagantly colourful, and rather surreal, pixel art certainly draws attention to itself, both visually and through witty asides in the dialogue. As do the match-3 maps, which are foregrounded as created things that were made to be played with and that don’t make sense outside of a video game world. (Even the very use of the match-3 genre, which is more generally found at the more casual, populist end of the video game market, is significant.) Meanwhile, you find yourself both fully immersed in this world as the player of a rather difficult strategy game, while also being an observer of it – a reader of its artistic construction and its cultural significance. This sense of being both inside and outside the fictional world also plays into the story itself.
It feels like AP Thomson is completely in control of his material and understands the game’s relationship to the real world as well as the one between himself, as creator of the game, and the implied player/reader. As with all the best works of fiction, meaning is generated – and ideas are played around with – in a sophisticated collaborative dance in which both author and reader find interpretive flow together, as one. The creator invites players to suspend disbelief around the fictionality of the world, even as he invites you to engage with the joy and playfulness of its creation. It’s quite a feat and is perhaps the true ‘magic’ that lies at the heart of Titanium Court.
