One of the best games of the year won’t be confined to Steam for much longer.
At this point, more video games are released in a month than most folks can play in a lifetime. More than 21,000 games have been released on Steam alone so far this year. Many of those will not be worth your time, but one I can absolutely recommend is Titanium Court. It’s one of the best games of the year and many more people will soon get the chance to play it. The game is coming to Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, PlayStation 5, Android and iOS on October 29.
Titanium Court debuted on Steam back in April. It made waves earlier in the year after winning the Seumas McNally Grand Prize at the Independent Games Festival Awards. Developer AP Thomson (who also won that award in 2025 as part of the team that made Consume Me) has crafted a beguiling run-based game that hasn’t been far away from my thoughts for the last six months. It’s a roguelite but also a visual novel and at the same time an RPG.
🚨 Titanium Court has escaped from our computers! 🚨
📣 It’s marching towards Nintendo Switch 1 and 2, PlayStation 5, iOS, and Android 🎮 📱
Brace yourselves; it arrives on October 29!
A run (which is called a “war” here) is made up of multiple battles, each of which has two phases. The first is essentially a match-three game in which you’ll move around tiles representing things like wheat, rivers, forests and enemy castles. Line up three matching tiles, and you’ll gain relevant resources or wipe enemy strongholds off the map. At the same time, you’re setting up the battlefield for the second stage, in which baddies will attempt to attack your base, which is also a tile on the grid. Before this phase starts, you can use resources to shore up your defenses by recruiting soldiers and other workers.
That’s the main thrust of the gameplay, but there’s so much more to Titanium Court. The game shackles you from trading too much at stores and it might block you from carrying out what you think is a winning tactic. You can’t really break the game’s rules as you can in incremental roguelites like CloverPit and Balatro. Figuring out what the restrictions are is part of Titanium Court‘s charm.
That extends to the meta-game that takes place between runs. Your character is the court’s new queen, who is initially clueless as to what’s going on. They don’t know how they ended up in this bizarre kingdom, where road signs exist alongside dragons as well as faeries that don’t believe in the concept of cars. On your quest to get home, you may encounter references to baseball, Jenga and all manner of pop culture touchstones.
Titanium Court is a stylish, clever and wildly offbeat game. It’s packed with jokes and surprises so I don’t want to give too much more away here. I’m excited to dive into it again, probably on my phone to hopefully dissuade me from doomscrolling.
