Hi gang! Hope you're doing well. This is the inaugural edition of the Ghost version of Corridors of Time, available at blog.theodoraward.com. The website is very much a work-in-progress, but it contains all the posts I made on Substack, too, as well as a couple of pieces I wrote and didn't send out. Anyway, this is a critical review of the interesting new game Titanium Court. More soon! <3
Titanium Court is a witty, clever, interesting, well-written game. It looks and sounds gorgeous: the tiles are lovely, and the way it handles “cinematic” animations is genuinely unique. The actual gameplay — the match-3 strategy game at the its center — took a moment to click, but wound up feeling brilliant. The part I didn’t like was structural and narrative, and it ruined the game for me. Explaining this will require spoilers; consider this the spoiler warning.
I also want to mention at the top an excellent review of the game which focuses on the same thematic stuff, but from someone who really enjoyed it: Rebekah Valentine's review for Kotaku.
Titanium Court is a brilliantly original game, so it’s kind of hard to describe. The short version is that you play as a woman who has been mysteriously transported to a world populated by “faeries.” The faeries are extremely funny: inscrutable immortals, they are usually dressed in businesswear, and their business is a daily bout of war: these are the wonderfully strange match-3 tower-defense sequences. After the war concludes each evening, you hang out and explore the court for a while, chatting with funny little guys and developing the story. At the end of the evening, you can ask the mysterious central NPC, the puckish “Puck,” exactly one question about what this place is. (There’s a lot of Shakespeare in this game, specifically A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and it’s interesting to think about — world’s a stage, merely players, etc. — but the allusions didn’t really affect my overall interpretation very much.)
I admit that I may have been primed in the wrong direction by the comparisons to Blue Prince, a tricky, thorny, occasionally-cruel-feeling game which ultimately opens out onto a deeply moving generosity. But it’s apropos in some ways: Titanium Prince is a game in which something is going on beneath the surface. Why are you here? Why does everyone talk like this? Why is Puck avoiding you? There are hints of a great evil who may or may not be the player character’s twin. It’s all very interest-piquing.
Keep playing and the situation, as situations are wont to do, begins to deteriorate. You start to get the sense that this is somehow your fault, or at least a result of your being in the Court. This is largely conveyed by a specific narrative mechanic — what’s referred to in the game as faeries becoming “stale,” or repeating one dialogue line over and over again. Going stale is regarded as a mysterious and terrible fate, one whose cause is unknown; it’s upsetting and sad to see a character go stale.
But as the game progresses, you realize there's a metafictional point here: a character goes stale when they run out of written dialogue. Your curiosity and enjoyment, it seems, are coming at the direct expense of the world you’re curious about.
Other things like this start to happen. There’s a wonderful cat who wants you to build a tower up to the top of a shelf in the cellar, which requires a very clever and playful implementation of the Match-3 mechanics. A few days after you complete this, the cat dies. This scene is genuinely moving in its writing and implementation; it’s one of the best-written scenes I’ve seen in a game in a while. But considered in light of the overall narrative, it serves to reinforce the central point the game insists, again and again, on making: it’s bad that you’re here. The things you’re doing for this world are bad. You spending time here at all is bad. As Puck says many times, you should never have come; you should leave immediately.
The great evil in the world of Titanium Court, it turns out, is you, the player. This isn't a matter of interpretation: Puck breaks the fourth wall and says as much. Your desire to play the game is actively deleterious to the characters in the game, who are written in such a way as to inspire you to want to protect them from harm. They began to be hurt from the moment you entered, and the only thing that will save them is leaving. In fact, talking with them and learning about them is precisely what puts them at danger. Put glibly, the central argument of Titanium Court seems to be that liking it makes you bad, or at least makes you want to do bad things.
This zero-sum attitude is reinforced by the endings. After a certain point, you gain the capacity to leave. The game warns you that this is the point of no return, and it is. Your save is locked to one save-file; when you leave, this save is locked, and when you load it, you’re just sitting at a bus station.
I’d finally hit my stride with the game when I reached the possibility of leaving. I’d begun to understand some of the systems, and I was enjoying getting to the bottom of the mystery, so I decided not to leave and kept poking around for a few in-game days. Eventually, I looked up what the point of no return entailed.
It was only then that I began to put the pieces together. I’ve read a few different accounts of people’s endings. As best as I can tell, you can leave the Court in a wide number of different states, but you can’t get any “better” or “worse” endings; it’s just a matter of how much damage you do before you leave. The meticulous, genuinely spectacular effort Thomson put into making it fun, good to look at, nice to play — it’s nothing more than an elaborate temptation. It’s bad for the world of the game to play the game. As far as I can tell, the game is unequivocal about this. All the fun you have is at the expense of the characters’ suffering. It’s brutal. Recognizing the game’s overarching structure — “the Point,” as the game puts it — made me feel like an idiot and a jerk in a way I’ve never quite felt from media. It actually kind of hurt my feelings, in the way a mean prank might.
As is probably clear by now, I don’t understand this game. Am I missing something? It’s a genuine question. I don’t understand why a game designer would put so much effort into crafting something whose entire structuring narrative conceit is that playing it is bad. I want to keep playing it, because Thomson is a brilliant developer who has made a really good video game, but doing so will hurt the characters, and I don’t want to see that happen — not because I think they’re actually real, but because they are written well, and I am attached to them in the way one gets attached to good characters in good narrative art.
The weirdest twist of the knife is that Thomson themself is a major presence in the game. It’s clear from the title screen that the game is a solo effort by them, and they make a few cameos. This makes the central insult of the game feel oddly personal. The autobiographical insertions serve to make clear who precisely set this world up this way, who it is that’s getting the last laugh. Gags that felt playful in the moment (the cameos largely come in the form of interminable, unskippable songs performed by Thomson themself, which you can occasionally choose to watch in lieu of fighting a given war’s final boss) started to feel like jokes I hadn’t realized in the moment were actually at my expense.
Extrapolated outwards, the “lesson” of Titanium Court rhymes with one of the lies of depressive thinking: your continued existence is actually hurting the people to whom you are attached; if they express attachment to you, this is either a lie or a mistake. Perceiving the game’s narrative as a depiction of what it feels like to be depressed is the closest I can get to appreciating it. But if it is a depiction how it feels to believe that the world would be better off without you, it should’ve given us some counterpoint to hold onto, because that’s a horrible, cruel feeling. Besides, the person who made the game is right here! We can see the strings being pulled; this is the person who’s pulling them. We know that Titanium Court a constructed object, not a structure of reality, because the god who made it so cruel is right there. It could’ve been made differently, but it wasn’t. (Maybe it’s a depiction of being a depressed Gnostic.)
I suppose the game is making an “anti-completionist” point — one ought to feel comfortable leaving things unresolved, etc. — but that feels patronizing and misguided to me. I really don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with wanting to experience everything a cultural object has to offer. I love rereading books and rewatching movies. Games, especially service games, frequently exploit players’ fear of missing out their and addictive tendencies, but they do this through time-limited events and gacha pulls and so on — mechanics and incentives that games like Titanium Court as a rule do not have. There’s a discussion to be had about whether a game like Balatro is “addictive” in a deleterious way, but the integration of gambling mechanics into single-player games isn’t the object of Titanium Court’s critique. Some single-player games add busy work to pad “completionist” playtime, but that’s just bad design, I think. You should know when to give up on something because you’ve stopped having fun, but I was still having fun with Titanium Court when I realized I was being asked to stop.(Compare the anti-completionist philosophy here to the curiosity-friendly Blue Prince, where the player’s desire for “completionism” is used as an invitation to a rich, hidden world, one full of wonderful and moving secrets.)
Is it just a game about how videogames are bad? I’m sorry, but I like videogames. Sometimes I genuinely am sorry I like them — I feel guilty and ashamed sometimes about how much I like them, a guilt and shame this game tapped into. I think videogames as they presently exist cause a lot of pain, but I don’t think they’re intrinsically harmful. I don’t think being curious is intrinsically hurtful. I think it’s actually a good impulse to want to experience a work of art to the fullest.
Maybe the point is that endings are often disappointing and anticlimactic. There’s an argument to be made that pretty much any satisfying ending in a work of narrative art is unrealistically neat, that satisfying endings in stories train us to want something from life than life is incapable of giving. And there’s value in the partial experience, the incomplete one. It’s a good point, but it’s a different point than Titanium Court’s, I think, which is not merely that real experiences might lack satisfying endings. It’s that the desire to play the game at all — especially when that desire dovetails with curiosity about others — is actively harmful.
I suppose Thomson wanted to create a distinctive experience. I hope — if they meant well with this game, which I assume they did — that they’d regard this reaction as within the range of legitimate responses. It’s certainly been a singular experience for me. I just wish I’d understood more quickly, so I could’ve followed the game’s argument to its logical conclusion and refunded it.