Titanium Court is an unusual mix of strategy and match-3 gameplay, postmodern Shakespearean storytelling and lo-fi music. Players match tiles to reshape battlefields before leading tiny fairy armies into combat, but the game’s unpredictable turns are central to its appeal.
One encounter lets players skip a rematch against a hungry dragon in favour of a musical performance. The alternative is an extended, comic song about Pacific salmon and desire, delivered by a pixel-art singer-songwriter. These performances are optional and were written and performed by AP Thomson, the game’s 36-year-old almost-solo developer.
Thomson told the Guardian he learned guitar specifically to make music for the game and spent more than a year testing songs at open-mic nights. He also composed the warped, laid-back music heard elsewhere in Titanium Court. The project began during the Covid period as a side project while he was working with designer Jenny Jiao Hsia on Consume Me.
The story begins with a journey through the woods to a fairy castle, where the player is expected to become its ruler and lead the fairies in an apparently endless war. Between battles, players can explore the castle and its passages, talk to its inhabitants and piece together the strange events. The game nods to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, framing its story as a play within a play within a game; at times, the fairies discuss the player watching them from above.
Thomson said fairies gave him room to explore unusual ideas and combine elements that might not otherwise fit together. He also cited Naomi Novik’s fairytale-inspired fantasy novel Spinning Silver as an influence, saying he wanted to move beyond the Tolkien-style fantasy common in games.
Its 8-bit-inspired pixel art and vivid pink palette add to the surreal atmosphere. The fairies often wear suits and skirts, a look Thomson said was influenced by stock photography, whose familiar subjects can feel uncanny and exaggerated.
Titanium Court is now available on consoles and smartphones, as well as PC. Its story and events are deliberately difficult to predict, and the game’s appeal lies in discovering its unusual world rather than knowing in advance what will happen.
Sources: The Guardian Technology.