The other evening, in those weird hours when it’s too early to go to bed but too late to dig into a new task without ruining any chance of going to bed, I was looking for a new game to play. I remembered seeing mention of the demo for Titanium Court, a game that in its Dawnfolk vibes felt like it might be something small and lightweight to poke around in at the end of the day. It was not that. I don’t quite know what it is, but I like it.
Titanium Court appears to be several games in one. There’s a match-3 section, and a battle section, and a whole narrative of a fantasy kingdom in which you wander into a party one night and then discover you are the queen, tasked with fighting enemy forces while you try to get out of there. Here’s a trailer that doesn’t explain anything:
The gameplay part of all this involves fighting enemies in a two-phase battle that takes place on a tiled grid. In the first phase, called High Tide, you match resource tiles into lines of three to remove them from the grid. Matching features like water, hills, and fields gives you resources like food, rocks, and wood. You can also arrange the landscape to better protect the square representing your kingdom from enemy troops, surrounding it with hills or water. Matching multiple groups of three in a row also gives you more turns to play during this phase, making the whole thing a complicated mini-strategy game.
In the second phase, called Low Tide, you spend the resources you’ve gathered to deploy soldiers or farmers. The farmers gather more resources as the battle rages (provided you left some resource tiles on the field for them to harvest), while the soldiers go out to destroy enemy strongholds or fight to keep enemies from reaching your kingdom. You don’t control your troops; you just watch their tiny fights take place interspersed with images of cricket players, cats knocking things off tables, and Jenga towers that represent the tide of battle.
Complications get added as the demo goes on. Special buildings can appear on the grid that you can access during Low Tide, but only if you keep them on the grid during High Tide, trying not to match them even when it’s very tempting. These can be hospitals that heal you, or shops where you can buy items; I was especially fond of a mirror I could arrange next to my kingdom to get two-for-one troops. Enemies get more varied, with catapults you can fend off by surrounding your kingdom with hills, or flying enemies who frequently mobbed by kingdom.
Layered atop all this is moving your kingdom along a roguelike map that even the game admits is confusing as hell, trying to make it to some kind of exit. And surrounding all that is the narrative element, which frequently breaks the fourth wall and is full of surreal jokes, talking cats, and a seeming conflict between the in-game narrative and the demo’s tooltips.
It would be easy for all this to become grating, but instead these narrative bits never overstay their welcome, lasting just long enough to be funny without becoming too much. Absurd maximalism is deeply not my thing, but it totally works here; characters in the game seem just as confused as you, and it creates this vibe that you're all in this together, trying to survive and make sense of this very strange world.
Titanium Court is weird as hell and completely charming, enjoyable both to play and just to experience, which feels like an impressive balance to pull off. The demo is available now, and the full game is "coming soon" according to Steam, though there's no release date yet.
