Earlier this year, I was stuck in hospital for several days, fuzzy on pain medication and bored out of my mind, with nothing but a Steam Deck for company. In the middle of one of those long nights, unable to sleep, I played a game called Titanium Court. It’s a strange creation that looks like it was made for the ZX Spectrum and reads like a postmodern Shakespeare adaptation – a compelling mix of strategy game and match-3 where you rearrange battlefields by matching tiles, before sending tiny lo-fi fairy armies to their deaths.
At the end of this late-night run, I met a boss I’d defeated before – a comically hungry dragon – and the game asked if I would like to skip the boss fight and enjoy a musical performance instead. A game has never asked me this before. And then, instead of the familiar tiled battlefield, I was looking at a pixellated singer-songwriter, who launched into an extremely long preamble about the mating habits of the Pacific salmon before saying, “This is a song for anyone else who ever got so horny they could die,” and launching into a soulful acoustic guitar number accompanied by crude images of leaping fish.
I began to wonder if my meds were making me hallucinate. That pixellated singer-songwriter is AP Thomson, the game’s 36-year-old almost-solo developer. When I interviewed him, he told me he learned to play the guitar with the express intention of making music for Titanium Court, and went to open mic nights every week for over a year, workshopping songs to replace the boss fights – songs that are, I must emphasise, entirely optional for the player.
He also made all the warped, chill, shoegazey music that accompanies the rest of this singularly weird game, which started out as a side project while he was helping to make the (also brilliant) Consume Me with designer Jenny Jiao Hsia. It was a Covid project in the beginning, and indeed it does have a distinct flavour of “do you think a depressed person could make this?” about it. I get the impression that Thomson put pretty much every thought and idea he has ever had in there, somewhere, spiralling out from a deceptively simple matching game.
Titanium Court is one of my games of the year because even after 30 years of playing video games, I genuinely had no idea what was going to happen every time I loaded it up. It begins as you walk through the woods and are magically transported to a fairy castle, where you are suddenly expected to take up the crown and lead the fairies in a never-ending war. It is woozy and surreal and verbose: in between the battles, you wander the castle and its secret passages, talking to the fairies and trying to figure out what the hell is going on.
There are obvious echoes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the screen is framed by curtains, and the game is framed as a play within a play within a game. Sometimes the fairies talk about her – that is, you, the player, looking down on them from on high – in hushed, terrified tones. I got a little sick of the Tolkien-style fantasy.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
