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 …

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When Vampire Survivors first exploded onto the scene, it was pretty much all I could think about. The formula of jumping into runs, taking on thousands of enemies, and becoming absurdly overpowered kept me picking up the game again and again - Steam says I've played it for more than 60 hours. Over time, though, despite the game's many updates and expansions, the formula got stale, and I haven't played it in more than a year. But I've become obsessed with the Vampire Survivors universe once again thanks to the new spinoff Vampire Crawlers.

Vampire Crawlers - technically, Vampire Crawlers: The Turbo Wildcard from Vampire Survivors - successfu …

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With a vacation comes a big choice: What game should I focus on during the trip? I thought about grinding out the harder levels of Super Meat Boy 3D, but I was looking for something more chill. I could have dabbled more with Slay the Spire II, but I already know that's a game I'll be playing for a long time. I wanted something that I could really get lost in and finish in a little over a week. People of Note, a new music-focused RPG from Annapurna Interactive and Iridium Studios, turned out to be exactly what I needed.

In the game, you play as aspiring pop singer Cadence. What starts as a journey to outperform a popular boy band turns into …

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There's one very specific reason I keep a Wii U handy, and that's so that I have an easy way to play the classic pinball game Devil's Crush. Over the years, it has become a comfort game for me. I'm not entirely sure what it is, but there's something about the combination of familiar pinball gameplay and the demonic imagery that works so well together, and lets me lose myself in the chase for a high score. But now I have something else to fill that need, and it comes in a much smaller package.

Devils on the Moon Pinball for the Playdate has an extremely literal title. It's a game about playing pinball on the moon, which happens to be home to …

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The original Super Meat Boy is one of the best-known indie games of all time. Released in 2010, it's a brutally difficult 2D platformer, but so fun to play: The short levels almost feel like speedrunning puzzles, and even though they're filled with traps and buzzsaws, dying isn't so bad because you revive nearly instantly. Super Meat Boy 3D has much of the same spirit; it's just as infuriating, and just as satisfying.

Moving around as Meat Boy in 3D feels very similar to 2D, particularly his really floaty jump. Wherever you run (and where you die) you leave blood splatters, which are helpful visual reminders of where to go (or where you die …

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One of the year's most intriguing games was developed using software first released 40 years ago. Transfer Point looks and plays like a classic Mac point-and-click adventure game, and there's a very good reason for that: It was developed using World Builder, a game creation tool first released in 1986 that has since become freeware. "The initial motivation was wanting to share this tool that was really innovative at the time, and meant a lot to me as a kid," says developer Mike Piontek. "But the plan was to spend a few weeks on it, and I ended up doing it for over a year."

Piontek first became obsessed with adventure games as a kid, and a l …

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The Legend of Zelda games are grand adventures, but they can also be very comforting, with quaint villages to explore and warm landscapes to take in. Under The Island takes that idea a step further. It still offers the sense of exploration and puzzle-solving that makes Zelda games so satisfying, but it also takes place in a cozy, lighthearted world with an energy reminiscent of Stardew Valley. It's the kind of place you'll want to hang around in even when you aren't slaying monsters.

The game puts you in the role of Nia, a new resident on the seemingly normal Seashell Island. But soon it becomes clear things are much stranger than they appe …

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The funny shape of eggs is the curious lifeblood of Oeuf, the new physics platformer by prolific developer Increpare Games. In a gaming landscape saturated with complex systems dropped into simple games, that grapples with metaphor within straightforward narratives, and that is desperate to bring cinematic sensibilities into gaming, Oeuf only asks that you briefly consider how an egg might move as you roll, slide, and hop across its world.

That world is realized in crunchy, '90s-era 3D that brings to mind Ultima and Might and Magic. Like this archaic-seeming style - that Oeuf was released within a month of Resident Evil Requiem is a fun gra …

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There are a lot of games that try to emulate The Legend of Zelda, but few that manage to capture that spirit in such a small, concise package as Ratcheteer DX. The postapocalyptic game only takes a few hours to complete, but over that span it nails the classic Zelda vibe almost perfectly, offering a real sense of adventure along with the satisfaction of figuring things out on your own.

The game is set in a bleak future when most of humanity is hibernating beneath the Earth's surface in order to wait out an ice age. To keep things going, mechanics are awakened every so often to perform maintenance on all of the machinery that keeps everyone …

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