I was wondering how to describe this game, as it is very unusual and seems to defy proper categorisation. Eventually, I managed to come up with this:
It’s like if Bad North and Into The Breach made a baby with Puzzle Quest after reading Alice in Wonderland in The Office on LSD. With CGA graphics.
To see if that was really correct, I asked ChatGPT to tell me which game I was thinking of when given that description. To which, it said Titanium Court! So there you go. Titanium Court is exactly that. Well done me.
To expand a little, the main gameplay element is that of a match-3 puzzle game. However, there’s a whole metagame surrounding it. The game starts with you, wrest from your life, arriving in what seems to be a medieval court. Only it isn’t medieval as people wear businesswear, are obsessed with baseball (or, rather, the concepts of it but not the game itself), and you’re declared the Queen. Oh, and you’re in a perpetual daily war with… well, that isn’t clear.
Each day starts with some wandering of your court, grabbing breakfast, chatting with some folk, and then “after breakfast, the court goes to war”. War consists of a grid of various types of landscape, like mountains and trees. You start at the bottom, and there’s a boss at the top. You select a region of land from the row above you, and that opens out into a familiar match-3 layout. Win, and you then choose from the next row, until you reach the boss.
Each “battle” has two phases. The first is where you swipe the tiles around to match them, with different tiles generating different resources like wood or food. The “board” also has some enemy units which can also, sometimes, be erased by matching. The trick here is to both get rid of enemies, but also generate enough resources of the right kinds to facilitate the second phase.
Here, you have a timeline which shows the points at which various events, such as enemy spawns or attacks, will happen. You can then use “cards” (which you start with, or find or buy as you play) which allow you to “buy” things, like units or skills, with your resources. Once happy, you start the battle and it plays out in front of you. Defeat everyone, or at least survive until the end of the timeline, and you win.
There’s a roguelite element here too. You might reach the boss, but you’ll likely be woefully underprepared to win. Which boss on each run is seemingly random anyway. Thankfully, there are things you can do between battles in and around your court which can unlock buffs and other skills. Things like winning in certain ways, or discovering things in the court, or, well, I won’t spoil it. Half the fun of the game is just figuring out what the hell is going on. There are mysteries to solve (or not), friends and enemies to make, and puzzles to solve.
I don’t think I’ve ever played a game like Titanium Court. Well, like bits of it, sure, but actually like it? No. It is incredibly addictive with it’s just-one-more-run draw, plus your need to try and make sense of everything. Why are you the Queen? Who is the real Queen? Why so some characters literally run out of dialogue and then get stuck in a loop and are then put in the basement out of the way like they’re broken automatons? Why does nobody believe that cars exist? It’s fantastic, in all senses of the word.
