The Steam description for Titanium Court, the new and phantasmagorical video game from Consume Me co-creator AP Thomson, is purposefully baffling: “a surreal strategy game for clowns and criminals.” In the playing, it’s a video game that both does—and doesn’t—explain itself. A game full of words, but the shape of those words, what they really mean, isn’t clear.
Is Titanium Court a well-oiled match-3 video game? Yes. Is it a tower defense game? Also yes. Do you spend a significant amount of time exploring a castle like it’s an adventure game? Well, yes. Does the entire game, at times, feel like an elaborate trick being played on you? Absolutely.
It’s funny. It’s goofy. It’s also, all told, more straightforward than it seems. (Mostly.)
Titanium Court is both like and unlike anything else, with the exact mixture being the delight. It’s a game that makes sense as you peel back its layers, but in a world where players are expected to understand so much of a game's content via marketing and explainer videos, much of the joy is realizing what the layers even are.
“The whole picture involves some negative space that you can only see once you've traced the entire outline,” said Thomson in an interview with Remap, “and then you get a sense of the actual shape that it is tracing out. But it's not showing you that shape explicitly, and that is a theme that shows up inside the game, so it is commenting on what it is doing while simultaneously doing it.”
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The basic rhythms of Titanium Court, a game where the player has been magically transported to a world of dragons and fairies, revolve around a day and night cycle. By day, players are at war, but war involves match 3’ing resources to assemble a small army. In that phase, you’re also altering the very map you’ll be soon fighting on. Combat is out of your control, at the whims of what you’ve sent up and where—that’s the tower defense part. Survive long enough and you’ll face a boss. (Who you may or may not be able to defeat through violence, paying off, or watching a music video about horny salmon from Thomson himself.)
Win or lose, you move into the night cycle, wherein you explore a trippy castle, filled with a cast of characters whose interest in you is somewhere between disdain and indifference. Curiosity is rewarded, as you poke and prod at what might let you eventually leave—if you even want to.
When it’s time to move onto the next day, the game makes you press a big “okay” button, and it makes me chuckle every single damn time I press it.
“It is trying to blur the lines between a lot of concepts that are happening simultaneously,” he said. “You've got things that are happening on the battlefield that are ostensibly pretty standard medieval fantasy. Oh, a bunch of little soldiers went and conquered a castle! And it'll pop up an image of a guy hitting a golf ball or Jenga tower getting knocked down or something like that.”
Case in point:
It’s a game with puzzles and a game that often demands you look puzzlingly at it, as well.
Thomson, too, has been noodling with puzzle games for a while, personally and professionally.
“Puzzle game is almost the wrong word for games like Tetris or match 3’s in general,” said Thomson, who credits the 2007 DS game Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords for truly opening his ideas to the ways puzzle games can be dropped in elsewhere. “I think of them more as pattern matching games. I think of ‘puzzle’ as something closer to a sokoban-style game, where you've got a single solution and trying to solve something. But I've been very interested in them once I saw them less as games by themselves, and more as ingredients."
His online handle, “bad_tetris,” comes from having made many Tetris or Tetris-like games, but more specifically comes from a homebrew project where he programmed an AI to play Tetris by itself on an LED panel. The panel was then placed in a different part of the house he was in.
“I could hear from across the house where we had set this up,” he said. “ [You would hear] groans as people had been watching it spend an hour getting a line ready and then screwing it up. I want to say it was intentional, but I think I just didn't program a very good AI.”
The air of mystery around Titanium Court, in which there’s joy in being coy, was an accident.
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