Where can even start with Titanium Court? It’s a weird-ass game.

It’s… well… I guess if you have to categorize it, it’s an INCREDIBLY narrative-forward roguelite match-3 real-time strategy game. At a purely mechanical level the game is outstanding. The last time I can recall anyone doing anything remotely this interesting with a match-3 was Puzzle Quest, a truly amazing series (until it went off the rails), but this really honestly goes orders of magnitude more hard than Puzzle Quest in every possible way.

So the mechanical level. It’s a roguelite. Each run consists of a series of six encounters followed by an up-to-three encounter boss fight. Encounters have two phases: first you’re playing a match-3 game on a field filled with four resources and castles. Match a set and you get the resource you matched (like, 3 mountains scores you some rock), score a combo and you increase your match juice that gets consumed after each move. So hooray, it’s a match-3, but that’s just the first phase: when you run out of moves you transition to effectively a whole other game, where now you’re playing a strategy game on the map you just built. One of the special tiles is the actual titular Court itself, and you now need to defend it from THE ENEMY which spawns from the castles and forts you left on the map.

This second phase lets you use cards to purchase units with the resources you gathered and deploy them from your court. Like any good RTS you get a mix of workers, defensive units and offensive units… but you don’t control them directly. You spawn them and they do whatever they’re made to do. Workers will go seek out the nearest tile they’re equipped to harvest, defensive units will post up at The Court waiting for enemies, and offensive units will go hunting for the nearest fort or head to intercept enemy fighters. Then you slam the play button and watch your little guys do their thing. Survive and proceed to the next encounter, die and wake up the next morning in your quarters at The Court.

There is an INCREDIBLE amount of depth in this core gameplay. During the first phase do you fiend for resources you need for the units you’ve got? Do you match tiles in such a way that you have a safe moat around yourself? Do you forego resource matching to instead take out castles to reduce enemy forces? Then when you head to phase 2, do you spawn your workers first? Do you spawn your offensive forces first to hopefully take out enemy forts before they can spawn their own fighters? Do you focus on defensive fighters? Do you spawn nothing because you know the only fort that’s going to spawn anything is on the other side of the map and there’s a bunch of mountains and rivers in the way?

All of these are valid strategies! And there’s mechanical layers beyond that as well! At the start of a run you have to pick an occupation which defines your starting units, abilities, and the way you make money. These are all wildly different, the base one makes money when you defeat a fort, but everything else has some bizarre quirk that completely changes how you think about your play strategy, with different pros and cons. Also, before starting each encounter you get to pick your route. It’s not full on Slay the Spire with a sprawling branching path, you get three options… but you still have important choices to make at each encounter: Do you want more trees but no fields for food? Do you want two kinds of mountains but have to contend with flying enemies? Do you want to face the horrors of catapults? What kind of buildings do you want? Hospitals to heal? Shops to buy more units? Chests for random rewards? Markets to offload all those rocks you’ve loaded up on? Even these kinds of choices feed deeply into your overall strategy: Centaurs can’t cross water or mountains, so if you get an option of centaurs but increased rivers or mountains, you might easily get away with not having to fight anything. But conversely, you know you’re taking a risk if you’re going up against catapults without any mountains, because they can (and will!) cross-map you without anything in the way, but hey maybe it’s worth it if that option comes along with rare chest spawns.

So those are the mechanics but they’re not really the game. I said the game is narrative-forward and whooo boy is it ever forward. The game drops the player into a fae court… or a play about a fae court… or a game about a play about a fae court… it’s intentionally hard to tell. All you know is you’re surrounded by fae-folk (or people playing fae-folk) in a magical realm. They have declared you to be their queen and as regent of this court it’s your responsibility to direct the course of the eternal war that wages on. In between waging war as described previously, you have a castle to explore, subjects to interrogate, mysteries to solve, cats to help, curses to comprehend and break, and so on.

Similar to the war itself, activities at the court are split into two phases. In the morning before you head off to war you have access to a certain set of things, like going to the dining hall, talking to various advisors, selecting your occupation for the next war, but also activities like taking a shower (also presented as a match-3 game) where you have time to monologue about things going on in recent runs and what their implications might be. If you successfully win a run you get to explore the court again at night, which opens access to other rooms, and most importantly lets you talk to Puck, who will provide some important (but, of course, obtuse and cryptic) explanations about what the hell is going on in the game. You get one technically truthfully answered question after each win.

The game doesn’t seemingly have anything I’d explicitly call a “story”, there’s an unbelievable amount of narrative, but it’s all revealed non-linearly. Depending on who you go talk to in the morning or evening, or what boss you fight at the end of a run, or how you engage with that boss, or what abilities you use in combat, or any number of different choices you may make, you’ll get little scenes, often times directly interrupting the match-3 game you thought you were in the middle of. The match-3 game is good, but it can be subverted at seemingly any time to insert an goofy little scene about the nature of magic or how you could possibly explain the concept of cars and street signs to fae-folk.

The surreal, absurdist comedy of the denizens of the Titanium Court are not the framing device around the match-3 game, it’s the other way around. The game happily shows you this pretty early on, by letting you just skip what would in any other game be considered something very important so you can get right back into the goings-on of your various blue friends. Like, after you’ve beaten a given boss once (or, maybe based on some other criteria, it’s hard to be sure), if you reach that boss again you’ll be interrupted with a question from one of your advisors: “Hey, we know some people really don’t like boss fights, would you like to skip this boss fight and instead receive a musical interlude?” There is ZERO downside to this (except, maybe, if you really wanted to get a specific kind of win), and if you agree you are led directly to an in-game presentation of AP Thompson – creator of the game – performing one of several original songs. When it concludes, that’s it, you’ve won, and you proceed to the evening segment at the Court. Similarly, once you get far enough in, you don’t have to play the match-3 game at all to wander the halls at night, you can just skip straight there. Play as much match-3 as you want.

Titanium Court is unlike any game I’ve ever played. It has wonderfully charming and weirdly intriguing narrative paired with an incredibly deep and complex and equally weird match-3 game, and it gives you the freedom to spend however much time with each side as you want. More than that, it encourages you to apportion your time however you want. It’s the best game I’ve played so far this year, and I highly recommend it.