TITANIUM COURT
For: PC
From: AP Thompson
Rating: ★★★★+
REVIEWED BY MICHAEL ROBERTSON
Ah, welcome! Too bad the Queen isn’t here to greet you. No, no, don’t get up! How’s the weather today? You don’t know? Of course, we’re in a dark void right now, there is no weather. How did you get here? Well, a rather interesting tale you have. You’re saying the Court was attacked? Destroyed? But you’re in the Court, dear madam! Remember that the script is being written right now by the way, so perform as fast as you can and win the race! Oh and feed the cat while you’re at it. Welcome to the Titanium Court, my Queen.
Did that confuse you? Good, that is basically how Titanium Court starts. It doesn’t get simpler.
Titanium Court is a match-three strategy game with rogue-like and visual novel elements. Trying to simplify it down feels insincere though, like you aren’t explaining it well enough.
You play as the Queen, a leader of the eponymous Court. Unfortunately, you as the player know about as much as she does, as it seems the title was simply assigned to the first person who sat in the Queen’s seat. You must guide the Court through a war by reshaping the battlefield in your favour and gathering resources to defend it long enough to get home.
The best (worst, simple, complex, all good, very bad and amazing) aspect of the game is its writing. To put it bluntly, it’s eccentric. Within the first two minutes, you’ll be informed that the whole game is a race between the scriptwriters and the performers and come across someone asking to stretch a metaphor and inflate it into a balloon, a man who only answers questions that you haven’t asked yet and a well-fed but hungry cat who everyone seems to understand.
Characters will bring up the inanest of topics like it’s casual conversation; everything seems to have a meaning that you just can’t quite understand. It seems like every character is in on a very funny inside joke that you aren’t.
The game uses this style of writing to twist your every expectation. From dry, surrealist humour to inane rambling and strange, genuine moments, Titanium Court is clear it knows what it is and what it wants to be. It’s just not easy to see what it’s trying to say initially. Maybe take a break often - you can only take so much weirdness before you need a lie down.
The gameplay is - thankfully - not as confusing, though it is nowhere near simple. It is a match-three game with heavy emphasis on positioning and resource management, with an added dose of "risk/reward". The Court is at war, and the surroundings aren’t exactly stable, separated into "Low Tide" and "High Tide".
At High Tide, you manipulate the environment, matching tiles in groups of three. You try to hide the Court far from the enemy and reduce their numbers by matching them away. Each movement costs time, and multiple matches and combos at once give you more of it.
You can move the Court itself for a time hit, but it is a great way to hide yourself, as water is impassable by enemy ground troops and rocks slow them down. Keep an eye out for shops and chests - if you match them away, you can’t use them.
Once time is up, the landscape solidifies and you enter Low Tide, using resources to summon defences and resource gatherers from your Court and, if you were lucky enough to get the chests and shops, accessing some extra resources. Survive in Low Tide for a set amount of time and you can move on and do it all again.
Of course, it’s a rogue-like which means you will fail, though that comes with some benefits. The more you fail at war, the more the Queen’s wine glass is filled. Every time it is filled, you gain a point of "Comfort", a sort of skill tree that allows you to make the game easier. The inverse of Comfort is "Strife", doled out whenever you succeed. This gives you a way of making the game harder. I found this to be a fun little mechanic to spice up each individual run. Of course, that isn’t the only little hook to keep you going, but I’ll stop before I say anything more.
The cherry on top is the game’s overall style, just as strange and amazing as the rest. It’s surprisingly detailed in its pixel art, with colouring reminiscent of older computers like the C64, and uses its play-like presentation well. Music is sparse but enjoyable. The game even gets some physical humour from the simple act of moving a still image.
I don’t have much to nitpick except that sometimes it just feels like the game wants you to die and there’s not much you can do. Like having enemy castles in awkward positions, or no water or mountains to stop enemy advances. It’s the style of match-three to be like that sometimes, but generally I don’t feel as hard done by in Bejeweled as I did here.
Honestly though, a review just can’t do this game justice. Titanium Court is what I would define as "something only the truly insane would create"; my favourite type of game.
There’s just too much that you must experience to understand, and even less that I want to say at the risk of ruining the fun. The game has a demo and I urge you to play it. If you can get to the end and still want more, then go, buy and spread the word. The Court needs its Queen, after all.
