I have no idea what’s going on and I love it
It’s really, really impossible to explain what Titanium Court is, at least not clearly. It’s so difficult that even the game’s developer, AP Thomson, has struggled to describe their own game. It’s true, it’s become a bit, and it’s completely justified. In fact it’s a mix of so many game genres that nothing is really solid, and then when we think it’s one thing it actually shifts towards another. It has match-3 puzzles, resource management, tower defense and visual novel gameplay with adventure and RPG overlays. It’s wild an unpredictable
But it’s also very, very self-aware.
The game wants us to know that it’s smarter than us, that it will do everything it can to make us feel like we’re missing something or that there’s a thing that we’re not ready for yet – and it does all of that with just the simplest of interfaces and visuals.
The game is, quite frankly, play US instead of us playing IT.
Anyways. The basic premise is that we’ve woken up in a weird magical place and want to get out. To do so we have to find keys and exit out of the front gate of a weird mansion/castle, but we’re somehow drafted to lead the people into battle in an almost stage play.
To tell that whole mess of a tale thegame shifts through its various genres seemingly out of jest, but there may be a method to the madness once we pare down the layers.
The game looks and feels like something that appeared in 1985 on a Commodore 64 or Tandy 1000HX, with a minimal color, 8-bit sprites, bleeps and bloops on a pulsing soundtrack, and the feeling that it should have released on a 5 1/4″ floppy where typing “LOAD” and “RUN” would be the only way to get it going. It knocks its aesthetic intent out of the park.
Through the match-3 gameplay we get resources, we shift around the Court to better locations, and we plan and set up the world map around us. We can just match three to get small batches of resources or try to get combos that clear out more, but we do have to be careful. When the match-3 move timer ends we have to defend our castle based on the layout of the land and our resources, and hope that we’ve built up enough HP to survive the onslaught. We can hire townspeople or soldiers, get weapons, and do all kinds of preparatory tasks, but it relies partly on what we just did in the puzzle mode. Sure, that giant area of water was so satisfying to clear out, but it was a protective moat that can hold back some of the advancement of forces against us. Whoops!
In between defensive operations we meet people in the Court, we discover new stories and plots and quests, and we work to figure out what’s actually going on with our predicament. There’s drama, backstabbing and a hint of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, all with a war happening in the background.
And then we do it over and over again until we face off against obstacles, giant bosses and even some issues within the Court itself, and all in hopes of surviving and getting out.
It’s really cunning, and makes me feel smart and dumb at the same time, and I love it.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. This video first appeared as a part of The SideQuest Live for May 01, 2026.
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