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Titanium Court is a stylized match-3 battle game in which you are possibly kidnapped by fairies. I loved it and I didn't like it. I mean, I didn't like playing it. I loved the game.

It's doing two things. (Two big things. An infinite number of tiny things.)

One big thing is to build a narrative game on top of an RTS/autobattler on top of a match-3. All of these mechanics are coupled. Throupled? You arrange your battlefield by making groups of three tiles disappear; this also gains you resources, with which you buy units. Winning battles (or losing them) advances the storyline, as does exploration and dialogue; but you also occasionally take a shower, which is a match-3 grid of soap, water, and introspection.

The other big thing is to tell a story in you go to fairyland. I mean you, the person reading this review. Not "the protagonist" or "Wendy Darling" or "Alice". Not me -- I already went and came back. You.

People are always being snatched away to fairyland to learn some valuable lesson about themself or life. Okay, not always. Alice and Wendy are bad examples. Instead think Labyrinth or Groundhog Day or the TARDIS (modern era). The Divine Comedy, if you're middle-aged. It's an entirely familiar pattern. And since Titanium Court is a game, it's couched in the (entirely familiar) second-person language of adventure games: you discover a castle, you enter the gates, you sit at the table and eat fairy-fruit.

(It doesn't say "fairy-fruit", so you don't notice. I didn't notice.)

So fairyland offers you a whole storyline about changing your life, deciding what you need, choosing your axioms. It's all very metaphorical. It's done up in Midsummer Night's Dream by way of so many fourth-wall breaks that you could build a new proscenium out of the rubble. Fine. Good solid stuff.

Only gradually do you catch on that the protagonist is negative space. I don't mean in the usual AFGNCAAP sense -- that's a way for you, the generic "you", to put yourself in an adventure that's not about you. Titanium Court is about you; it's all about you; but the only "you" available is... you. What do you want from your life?

Is it baseball? It might be baseball.

These completely standard game-narrative tropes are stuck together in such an obvious way that it took me half the game to realize that they don't make any sense together. The sense that they do not make is the illogic of fairyland. It's kind of brilliant.

(I think this is what Wanderstop was groping for and absolutely could not find because Davey Wreden thought it was a game about him.)

I really enjoyed... thinking about Titanium Court. I enjoyed being surprised by Titanium Court, which happened repeatedly. I enjoyed the jokes and the clowns. I enjoyed discovering all the wacky variations it throws at the "match-3 battlefield" premise.

I didn't particularly enjoy playing Titanium Court. RTS combat isn't my thing. Match-3 actively bores me. I put in about six hours total, drilling for the mad little scenes with Robin or Puck. Everything in between left me feeling irritably dissatisfied with the time I'd just spent.

But that's fine! Because one of the questions the game asks is how much effort do you want to spend on this. By the time I'd put in six hours, I found four (spoiler) and had the option to use them. The game asked me, very directly, if I was done playing; if that was all I wanted out of Titanium Court. Yes, I said, I'm done. So I rolled the credits.

I know there's enormously more to the game that I never saw. There's way more than four (spoiler) to be found. Plus I only did three (spoiler) of I think thirteen. That's all fine. What I wanted from the game was a way out, and it offered me one with grace and compassion and not a hint of disdain. I took it and didn't look back.

I highly recommend taking a look -- whatever you want.

Very minor footnote: The game nearly uses the color palette of Apple 2 hi-res graphics (blue, green, magenta, yellow instead of orange). But it uses them in impossible combinations -- characters are detailed in blue and magenta, which cannot exist side-by-side on the Apple. This left me with a sense of ineffable disorientation which pervaded the entire game and which, yes, I might be totally making this up, I have no idea if AP Thomson was an Apple 2 nerd, but it's the kind of thing Titanium Court leaves me wondering.