Every review of Titanium Court starts with the same problem, so let me just get it out of the way: I have no idea how to describe this game to you. Is it a match-three puzzle game? Yes. A roguelite? Also yes. A tower-defense autobattler? That too. A lo-fi visual novel about faeries who don’t understand why humans let a “bus” devour them? Somehow, yes again. PC Gamer called it “the first prestige match-three game ever made,” and honestly that’s as close as anyone’s gotten. What I can tell you is that it’s one of the most singular, surprising, and quietly moving games I’ve played in 2026 — and that it won the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at this year’s IGF for good reason.
It’s the work of one person, AP Thomson, who wrote, coded, drew, and scored the entire thing (though, tellingly, he uses the closing credits to thank everyone who helped, gently pushing back on the lone-genius solo-dev myth). Fellow Traveler published it. And it opens with an Alice-through-the-looking-glass hook: you’re a woman going about her ordinary day when reality shatters and reassembles, dumping you at the gates of a strange walled court. A faerie acolyte named Puck informs you that you are, in fact, the long-absent queen of this place — and if you know your Midsummer Night’s Dream, the title “Titanium Court” (Titania) clicks into place right about then.
First, the silliness
On the surface, Titanium Court is a comedy, and a genuinely funny one. Your court is populated by immortal faeries who are, to put it kindly, a difficult bunch to manage. They speak almost entirely in riddles, half-truths, and non-sequiturs, and being deathless, they’re endlessly fascinated by the absurdity of mortal life. They’ll spot a “dead end” road sign and spiral into a meditation on the inevitability of death. They’ll find a school yearbook and wonder whether it’s “a tomb for friendship.” They’ll earnestly ask you to explain the difference between “offense” and “defense.” These little interrogations of our social rituals — love, work, sport, leisure — are the writing at its most delightful, and I found myself clicking on every character just to hear what nonsense they’d come out with next. Thomson’s surfy, dreamlike soundtrack, which sounds like The Ventures playing the Roadhouse in Twin Peaks, ties the whole woozy mood together.
Then, the actual game
Underneath the theatrics is a real, crunchy strategy game, and this is where your mileage will genuinely vary. Each “war” is a run of seven battles (bosses included), and every battle opens as a match-three puzzle: you slide tiles to generate resources, recruit units, and reconfigure the board, then the game pivots into an automated tower-defense phase where your troops march out and carry out their orders. Win and you push deeper into the run; lose and you’re back at the court. Before each fight you pick between three randomized battlefields — one thick with trees but no water, another crawling with knights and wormholes — and that constant stream of tactical wrinkles kept me engaged.
I’ll be straight about the catch, though, because it’s a real one: roughly 40% of the time, you are matching three tiles, and how much you love Titanium Court will depend heavily on how you feel about that. PC Gamer’s reviewer admitted the match-three fundamental wore on him no matter how much strategic depth got layered on top, and I understand the complaint — there’s a strange friction between the tidy precision of tile-matching and the tense imprecision of everything around it. Because it’s also a roguelike, you will re-fight stages and bosses repeatedly, and on a bad losing streak with few resources, the repetition can start to bite. If sliding tiles sounds like tedium to you, no amount of style is going to fully win you over.
And finally, the part I can’t spoil
Here’s where Titanium Court quietly stops being a comedy, and where I have to get vague — because so much of its power comes from being experienced cold, and because, frankly, I’m still not sure I fully understand it. At a certain point the madcap tone darkens. A debilitating condition begins spreading through the court, the faeries start to fade one by one, and the halls grow lonelier. And the cause, it turns out, appears to be you — the player. “You are a reader and player, voracious and destructive,” one of the game’s mirror bosses tells you.
It’s a stunning turn, and it recasts everything that came before. Titanium Court is built with every trapping of the roguelite — that genre engineered to keep you on the treadmill forever, chasing one more run — and then it becomes, of all things, an anti-roguelite. It asks you to stop. It wants you to leave the castle, to let the story be finished rather than grinding it into dust. Cleverly, it hands you multiple valid endings to do exactly that: you can meaningfully “finish” at around five hours, again near ten, or push past fifteen for every achievement — and crucially, none of the early endings feels like settling. Each is a real conclusion in its own right, which neatly defuses the repetition problem for anyone who doesn’t want to go the distance.
So who is Titanium Court for? It’s for the little freaks and the aspiring little freaks, as one reviewer lovingly put it — the people who believe games can be silly and profound at once, and that magic hides in the most unexpected places. It is emphatically not for everyone; if you’ve no patience for reading, clicking, and tile-sliding, you’ll bounce right off. But if you let it pull you in, you’ll find one of the most imaginative, mischievous, and unexpectedly tender things anyone made this year. I departed the court ruefully but willingly, exactly as Thomson intended — and I didn’t turn back for one last look at the beautiful mess I’d made.
