I am never on any kind of pulse. This blog’s very raison d’etre* is predicated upon the notion that I’m writing about that thing everyone else liked a long time after everyone had their two cents on it. But through luck (and possibly a brilliant PR strategy), I have found myself in a position to be able to yell at you loudly to find a to play AP Thomson’s Titanium Court.
Before I get into this, I want to make clear that even the small amount of Titanium Court that I’ve played indicates that this is the sort of game that will work best if you go in cold. You can read the Steam page for more information. You can even just straight up play the same demo I did since it’s now part of the current Steam Next Fest as of the time of writing. It might not seem like it’s helpful, but I promise it’s a very good indication of the game’s tone.
I’m now going to post some screenshots that will pose more questions than answers, and then I’ll go into some details. You have been warned.
In the small part of I’ve played, Titanium Court is a narrative-based sort-of Role Playing Game whose plot unfolds between a series of Match-3 puzzles. The aesthetic sits somewhere between EGA and what I will badly describe as high-resolution Bitsy graphics. The background music is delightfully earwormy, but completely OK with killing its own sense of chill at a moment’s notice in the interest of keeping the player on edge. It is a game that is self-assuredly odd, but doesn’t waste a drop of its carefully-brewed surrealism.
In his review of Death Stranding, within a tangent about attending a marathon of Andrei Tarkovsky films, game designer and Internet Person Tim Rogers states “I just love stuff with confidence in its own texture”. I’ve thought of this lot in my brief time with Titanium Court. I labour the point about the game’s inherent strangeness not because I want to make it sound kooky, but because of the deftness with which this world is being constructed. At no point do I feel that this world is odd for it’s own sake. There is too much intentionality in the writing, in the design of how this new world is explained to you. At the point that I stopped playing, a UI was being revealed to me that I do not yet know how to use. But I know it’s important, otherwise it wouldn’t be there.
I’ve met several other characters who seem to have less of an idea of what’s going on than I do. There is the person you meet at court who refuses to answer questions they’ve already been asked (but, you know, is aware enough of their deal to tell you things you might want to ask. There’s the person who doesn’t really know the name of where you both are, and is weirdly OK with this. And then there’s the two folks stuck in a narrative dilemma who turn said dilemma into a balloon dog. All of it is weird, but it’s supposed to be. You don’t yet understand why things are this way, but in a realm where topography can be rearranged simply by clumping certain clumps of land together, it stand to reason that those around you may also be susceptible to certain states of slippage.
I have not shut up about this game since I played it earlier this month. Even as a demo (which, again, you can just go and play right now, I can feel Titanium Court swinging at some sort of big and mysterious idea, and I find this genuinely exciting in a way I havem’t felt about a videogame for a whilte. It makes me want to play AP Thomson’s other games too, like Fortune 499 and Beglitched, in the hopes this will give me some sort of indication of where Titanium Court is going. And if it doesn’t, I’m just pleased to have a demo to finish.
I was provided with a key for Titanium Court’s demo by way of Pantaloon’s mailing list – you too can sign up for this if youlike. I received no compensation for writing this not-review.
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