It sounds like the stuff of desires. Fever desires. The theatre viewers is ready, and you’re in the wings. Without warning, an MC announces that the lead actress is unavailable, so you’re thrust onstage as understudy – but without a clue what you’re supposed to do. A solicitor’s billboard.
Titanium Court, the creation of New York-based developer AP Thomson, is pushed by a singular imaginative and prescient. It mashes up virtually anything it can get its fingers on – whether it’s totally different sport genres, totally different musical kinds, or just totally different photos of sports activities or snappy tailoring or the Highway Code. Since the only common thread seems to be the developer’s thoughts, it feels unusually personal despite the miscellaneous compilation of concepts leaping out of nowhere. A person in a swimsuit taking part in a trumpet.
Looking at screenshots, you’ll think this is a match-three sport – and it kind of is: it’s a strategic, roguelike, narrative-driven match-three sport. In truth, the match-three sport seems as shocked to be there as you are. Having been dropped into the theatrical setting, you soon set up that your function in the drama is that of the faerie queen, ruling (cluelessly at first) over your royal court. Said court sits in a terrain of matchable tiles that can each be swapped with adjoining ones to make three in a row. Matched tiles disappear and anything sitting above them falls down the screen, with new tiles showing from the prime to fill any gaps. Depending on what you match, you will obtain sources of totally different varieties – food, stone, wooden or water. As you make strikes, a bar depletes, freezing the terrain once it runs out. A pair of sun shades.
That entire match-three-ing part is called ‘high tide’. Once ‘low tide’ arrives, the court goes to battle. The terrain you’ve completed your best to design becomes the battlefield. Usually, there are enemy fortifications on it, and you must spend your sources to be prepared to deal with them by coaching troops or employees or setting up defences. However, this is all half of a bigger marketing campaign, so sources should be strategically preserved for subsequent rounds. A basketball swishing the internet.
Between runs, you are returned to your faerie court, where thriller unfolds to an eerily wistful tune. These sections are introduced in a top-down view of the royal residence, with icons to choose your actions: go to the eating corridor, discuss to your aide, take a bathe, and so forth. The story is instructed here by the characters in the play — or perhaps the solid — always conserving logic just about at arm’s size. The repetition of the high-and-low-tide gather-and-hunt routine is constantly enjoyable, but it’s the in-betweens that present pacing, a narrative arc, and an alternative to put the sport down until your next chapter, breaking up the addictive loops common to match-threes. A rock star smashing their guitar.
Through all of this, it’s not clear whether your wide-eyed confusion is half of your function. Are the other characters serving to you according to the script, or are the actors out of character, serving to you to perceive the script? But the script is unfinished anyway, the MC announces up entrance: the writers are racing you to the ending. Even your tooltip is in on the entire charade, personified in dialogue with you. The general impact is something bizarrely coherent. It’s a jumble of a idea but, wrapped in the framing gadget of the theatre, nothing can technically be out of place. A ‘No Parking’ signal.
If we attempt and strip it all down to the gameplay necessities, Titanium Court has a moreish rigidity going on. The strategising grows in sophistication the more you play, and the objectives of the sport get clearer. However, those objectives always lie on the other facet of the randomness of the tile-matching mechanics. The stability of ability and luck is just about proper, and complemented by the interspersed court segments. Success feels like your own achievement, while failure — although sometimes due to merciless tile-generation — affords an alternative to chill out in the court and discover its eccentricities – or who knows what might occur, frankly? A sticking-plaster.
So there’s a stable sport under all the theatrics, but the theatrics are what will grab and maintain your consideration. The writing is considerate without pontificating, humorous without leaning on jokes, and adventurous without dropping sight of its absurdity. Perhaps the most absurd factor is how naturally this gels with a style so far eliminated from Titanium Court’s philosophical ambitions. You could argue that the repetitive components of the sport put on out their welcome – but that’s not before the meta sport gives you an out. You can play again and again if you like, but this is a managed story that has an opinion about how and when it should finish. It wouldn’t be truthful to choose it on what comes after the curtain call. A glass of wine.
The graphical fashion also works splendidly. Despite the tight color palette on a darkish screen, issues soar to life. The eye-catching, whimsical photos that pop up will bounce or fly or slide across the window in methods that match the motion completely. The thrill of an out-of-nowhere, pixel-art landing as the battle music rocks out is just good. A canine catching a frisbee.
Conclusion
Theatrical efficiency, narrative journey, strategy sport, match-three… Shuffling its deck of faerie queens and love potions and slam dunks and Ray-Bans, Titanium Court is the freakiest dream you’ve ever had. It might baffle your psychoanalyst, but that’s no purpose to wake up.