為何《Titanium Court》是 2026 年最古怪、也是我最喜愛的遊戲之一

Earlier this year, I was stuck in hospital for several days, fuzzy on pain medication and bored out of my mind, with nothing but a Steam Deck for company. In the middle of one of those long nights, unable to sleep, I played a game called Titanium Court. It’s a strange creation that looks like it was made for the ZX Spectrum and reads like a postmodern Shakespeare adaptation – a compelling mix of strategy game and match-3 where you rearrange battlefields by matching tiles, before sending tiny lo-fi fairy armies to their deaths.

At the end of this late-night run, I met a boss I’d defeated before – a comically hungry dragon – and the game asked if I would like to skip the boss fight and enjoy a musical performance instead. A game has never asked me this before. Of course, I accepted. And then, instead of the familiar tiled battlefield, I was looking at a pixellated singer-songwriter, who launched into an extremely long preamble about the mating habits of the Pacific salmon before saying, “This is a song for anyone else who ever got so horny they could die,” and launching into a soulful acoustic guitar number accompanied by crude images of leaping fish. I began to wonder if my meds were making me hallucinate.

That pixellated singer-songwriter is AP Thomson, the game’s 36-year-old almost-solo developer. When I interviewed him, he told me he learned to play the guitar with the express intention of making music for Titanium Court, and went to open mic nights every week for over a year, workshopping songs to replace the boss fights – songs that are, I must emphasise, entirely optional for the player. He also made all the warped, chill, shoegazey music that accompanies the rest of this singularly weird game, which started out as a side project while he was helping to make the (also brilliant) Consume Me with designer Jenny Jiao Hsia.

It was a Covid project in the beginning, and indeed it does have a distinct flavour of “do you think a depressed person could make this?” about it. I get the impression that Thomson put pretty much every thought and idea he has ever had in there, somewhere, spiralling out from a deceptively simple matching game.

Titanium Court is one of my games of the year because even after 30 years of playing video games, I genuinely had no idea what was going to happen every time I loaded it up. It begins as you walk through the woods and are magically transported to a fairy castle, where you are suddenly expected to take up the crown and lead the fairies in a never-ending war. It is woozy and surreal and verbose: in between the battles, you wander the castle and its secret passages, talking to the fairies and trying to figure out what the hell is going on. There are obvious echoes of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; the screen is framed by curtains, and the game is framed as a play within a play within a game. Sometimes the fairies talk about her – that is, you, the player, looking down on them from on high – in hushed, terrified tones.

“Fairies are a really good avenue for exploring weird ideas about the world,” Thomson told me. “As a narrative plot device, it let me do whatever I wanted, which was great for a side project where I was throwing all sorts of stuff into the mix.” In 2019 he read Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik, “which is a really good fantasy novel in the mode of a fairytale, and I thought, we should be doing this more. I got a little sick of the Tolkien-style fantasy. It’s interesting that Shakespeare isn’t as common a touchpoint in game development as Marvel and Tolkien.”

I’ve been a game critic for a very long time, so I really enjoy it when I struggle to describe a game, and what’s good about it. It’s an interesting creative challenge. But I am not going to say much more about how Titanium Court works or what happens within it, because discovering that is the entire point of the game. Fairies allow for a kind of unreality and double meaning, for things to not really make sense in the moment or indeed at all. I experienced many moments that seemed so specific and serendipitous that I felt as if I must surely be the only player to have ever seen them.

“For a lot of it, I did wonder if anybody is actually going to see this particular thing or combination,” Thomson says. During testing, his girlfriend came across a scene that he didn’t even remember writing.

The sense of unreality is heightened by Titanium Court’s very odd 8-bit-style pixel art and extremely pink colour palette: it’s very 80s core, and the fairies around the castle are mostly power-dressed in suits and skirts. This visual character was inspired by stock photos, Thomson says. “Stock photos do feel otherworldly, right? They feel like they are representations of common parts of human experience, but they’re also caricatures of those things … there’s an uncanniness to the stock photo.”

In the game fiction there is a spell keeping you inside Titanium Court’s castle – but I didn’t need any magic to keep me obsessed with this game long after I left hospital. I think I’ve seen almost everything it has to offer, but I can’t possibly be sure. Over time you come to understand its warped logic and its sense of humour; you know when it’s about to screw you over, and you anticipate the laugh. It’s now out on consoles and smartphones, so you no longer need a Steam Deck or PC to play it. Give it a go – you will never forget it.

What to play

Speaking of games of the year: I have spent the past couple of weeks playing through one of the most pivotal games of my childhood in newly remade form, and I am happy to report that The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on Switch 2 is a dream come true. It’s always a risk returning to games this important (and this old), but in contrast to the light-touch remaster that came out on the Nintendo 3DS in 2011, this is a full-on reinvention that brings out the best of what was already there, while elegantly addressing whatever needed updating. It is a melancholy story, rather than a whimsical one – there is a central tragedy to child Link awakening in the Temple of Time as a grown man, with the weight of saving the world on his shoulders. But there are so many moments of pure delight that I fail to see how anyone could be unmoved by it. What a time to be into video games!

Available on: Nintendo Switch 2
Estimated playtime: 30-plus hours

What to read

• Activision’s latest Call of Duty game took some heat last week after it was discovered that it included footage from a real-world South Korean disaster as part of its scene-setting opening montage. The publisher has apologised and will remove it in a patch.

• Developer Arkane Lyon – beloved for its Dishonored series – is being sold off by Xbox as part of its year-long “reset”, and a new Bloomberg report suggests that Ubisoft is among the potential buyers.

• A wonderful story from Game File here about the recently released Control Resonant, which contains an in-game art gallery filled with, it turns out, works by the developers’ parents.

• As AI-assisted slop games, copycats and fakes continue to flood every online game store out there, indie hub itch has mass-deleted a bunch of them, and attempted to give players some control over what they’re seeing by letting you filter out games with an AI disclosure note. Unfortunately this is a huge-scale problem: itch reports that newly created game pages have doubled in the past two months.

What to click

• Tomb Raider’s creators on how the game changed their lives: ‘Skint staff were suddenly pulling up in sports cars’

• Alex Garland’s Elden Ring adaptation is on course to be Hollywood’s goriest ever fantasy movie

• After 50 years of playing video games, I’m finally starring in one

• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time review – a dream come true | ★★★★★

• Night Plane review – join the jumbo jet to hell in this indie horror head trip | ★★★★☆

Question Block

It’s now November, and you know what that means: it’s GTA VI month. Thirteen years and a rumoured billion dollars in the making, this game is a world unto itself. Do you have questions about the biggest game of the decade? Are you looking forward to it? Have you booked a week off work? Send in your questions and comments via pushingbuttons@guardian.co.uk.