The year’s weirdest game is hard to explain and even harder to put down

The first rule of Titanium Court is that you can’t explain Titanium Court. Not because we’re living under the omerta of an 8-bit Fight Club, but because it’s one truth I can stand by. For the past week, I’ve been facing the consequences of getting isekai’d into a digital pastiche of the entire history of dramatic allegory and contemporary humor, leading a whimsical quasi-sentient court of wildly unmedicated faeries to their doom. They try, in their roundabout faerie way, to be helpful, because I don’t know what I’m doing. “I’m looking forward to you explaining the game to me,” said my editor Andrew Webster — words he silently swallowed after I tried to do just that.

This isn’t to say that Titanium Court is unknowable. It is simply one of those things you have to experience for yourself. The most straightforward description, to paraphrase from developer AP Thomson’s game credits, is “a match-3 tower defense game for people who love to read.” This is a bit of an understatement because Titanium Court is also a point-and-click roguelite RPG, a resource management game, a deckbuilder, a visual novel metacomedy of manners, a whole helping of postmodern theater, an ode to HyperCard, the equivalent of ludic ASMR for appreciators of the victory animation from Windows 98 Solitaire, and, if you grew up reading Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, Titanium Court is a rare and precious gift.

We begin with literal curtains parting and an emcee stepping forward with an introduction. He discusses my role as the player with the nonchalance of a zookeeper giving a tour of the lion enclosure at feeding time. And just like that, we begin with the player minding their own business — a blip of pixels moving through a gridded landscape — before the entire map trembles and reforms to introduce the mechanics and key components of the terrain that you can “harvest” by matching at least three tiles (wheat gives food, hills give stone, and so on). Soon, over the horizon, we see the mysterious Court and are swept inside to meet its faerie residents. Here, the world lives at the mercy of a magic tide, with no clear way of leaving.

There are two modes: when you’re at war, and when you’re not. Being at war is a deeply unserious yet profound endeavor – the Court is immortal, so death isn’t really a huge deal to them, but you also can’t get a grip on the Court’s absurd mythology and the faeries’ evasiveness. War is matter-of-fact and routine. It’s something you wake up and do after breakfast, which involves choosing a job (the default is as the Monarch, which earns money per enemy keep destroyed), and learning to traverse two kinds of maps, strategize between different terrain and enemies, and find different ways to overcome bosses. My favorite job is Youth, which you receive by means of a cigarette lighter and involves incinerating tiles on the board to make money.

Every battle begins with High Tide — the match-3 portion — where you do your best to arrange the board to your advantage. Low Tide is when the RPG / combat / management stuff kicks in. You queue up workers and combat units, make transactions with vendors, and take advantage of useful buildings like hospitals and shops. Sometimes you might find a giant jar, or come across a man on a stump, or float past a billboard that captures the imagination of the Court (faeries do not believe in cars, and every time you see a road sign designed for vehicular laws, it causes a small fuss). You might try an obscure solution from a magic journal entry you can’t remember writing, gleaned from a hallucinated future in which you are a clockwork monastery.

Once everything is arranged how you want it, hit the play button, sit back, and hope for the best: All your little dudes stream out of the Court in a queue, perform their duties on a set timer, and hopefully, the Court remains standing when time is up. If all goes well you win the battle and edge closer to the boss on the overworld map. If not, you get wine and “comfort.” After enough progress, you are offered the chance to skip boss fights by watching a wholly unskippable musical performance by AP Thomson himself, rendered in grainy, nigh-indecipherable full-motion video. The first one I watched was — and I say this with the utmost admiration for everyone involved — like if Paul Banks from Interpol was in Ween and did an educational take on the Salmon Dance.

I realize it sounds like I have a gas leak in my apartment, but I don’t. I have something better, which is Titanium Court.

When you aren’t at war, you’re hanging around the Court, an arcane medieval keep as befits a bunch of meddling faeries, but with the blessing of modern plumbing. The faeries here are a decidedly magical but contemporary bunch who believe in science and alcohol and supporting their beloved queen, even when it hurts them. There are curses and secret rooms and arguments to be settled. There is sportsball and a library and a cat. There’s a lot to unpack within the Court’s walls about why you were brought here, what you need to do, and how you leave, both allegorically and mechanically. Every night, everything collapses, and the next morning, it begins anew.

Titanium Court doesn’t break the fourth wall; it makes the player dismantle it themselves, brick by brick, before leaving them there in a limbo of indecisive regret and sentimental reflection, perhaps to build a new outlook of their own. The Court isn’t just a place. It’s an exercise in self-restraint and self-gratification, brimming with wordplay and satire and the endless “yes, and” mentality of good improv. At one point, after hours of (extremely good and creatively wrought) misdirection, after hours of NPCs trying to both help and hinder me, the game threw me such an emotional curveball that I had to step away and hug my cat. It dawned on me that AP Thomson is Jigsaw. He is squatting behind the scenes with his guitar, cackling when I realize the effect I’m having on the faeries as I hit the 15-hour mark of playtime.

Maybe the real game is trying to explain Titanium Court and failing, and in the process realizing what it’s done to your understanding of capital-m Magic — the silvery intangible stuff that glues our imagination together. When I finally manage to leave the Court, I marvel at having somehow survived all these deeply personal surgical strikes not just on me as a player, but on my relationship with storytelling and fiction as a whole. It’s a singular metacomedy that learned how to layer its story beats from the best sitcoms, and plays out like your most correct frenemy telling you exactly what you don’t want to hear about the nature of consumerism and entertainment.

This is the sort of game that will undoubtedly launch a thousand discussions, but for me it will remain personal and private. Nobody needs to know how much suffering I caused before I got up and walked away. To understand what that means, you’ll have to play it for yourself.

_{Titanium Court launches April 23rd on Steam.}