Category: Puzzle Game

Titanium Court

I am not good at portioning things. I read books in a single sitting, sometimes two if they are especially long. I’ve eaten an entire box of Oreos over a single day, and back when I had peanut butter in the house, eating the whole thing with a spoon was not an uncommon occurrence. The same is generally true of games. When I pick up a new game, especially a roguelike, I find myself playing for hours at a time.

I’ve had Titanium Court for just under 2 weeks, and in that time I’ve played 10 hours of it. This is a shockingly short amount of playtime for something I like this much.

Listing the labels that apply to this game is an exercise in pointlessness. They’re all there. It’s easy enough to put them out. But it’d be like listing the ingredients for a cake without the instructions. It’s mostly pointless.

I could tell you it’s a roguelike match-3 puzzle strategic tactics game, but I might as well tell you lemon, egg, butter, flour, sugar. Giving these descriptors might tell you why you wouldn’t like it(for example, if you really hate roguelikes or match 3 games, or are allergic to lemons), but it won’t tell you anything else about the experience.

Anyway, welcome to Titanium Court.

Gameplay

It’s a little tricky to know where exactly to start with Titanium Court, but war is probably as good a place as any. Every day, the court will go to war, and you must lead it. War consists of multiple encounters, and each encounter has two phases, high tide and low tide.

High tide is the match 3 phase. In this phase, you manipulate the battlefield by swapping around tiles. Matching tiles removes them from the battlefield and grants the appropriate resource. Match water for water, match wheat for food, match hills for rocks, and forests for wood.

Each move removes a small amount of your bar, with multi-matches refilling it. When the bar empties, it’s time for low tide.

Low tide is the prep phase for the tactical strategy portion. In this phase, you can produce units and cast spells from the unit cards in your slots. You have five slots for units and spells, and they can be cast as many times as you have resources. Most spells are instantaneous, but producing units takes time. Units go down the time tracker on the left.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a strategy game if it was just your units showing up. Enemy castles that are left on the board in Low Tide will produce units. Some attack your castle, some just sit around, and some don’t do much of anything.

Oh. Hmm. The word Enemy is in pink text over there. How very odd. Probably nothing to worry about.

Narrative

I find it tricky to talk about the narrative of Titanium Court for two reasons. First, I haven’t finished the game, and even if I did finish the game, I suspect that I don’t really understand what is going on with Magic, and the Enemy, and everything else. Second, I think it’s a big spoiler to reveal what I do think I know, but maybe I’m wrong. Third, the game’s tone is something I think is best experienced rather than revealed.

That said, I can offer a sort of litmus test; a bit of a sampler, if you will, of whether or not you will enjoy the writing in the game. At one point, I was offered the option to skip a boss fight in exchange for watching a three minute musical number about Atlantic Salmon. During another, a funeral procession was held for a football that I routinely failed to protect.

The game also has a few moments I’ve found surprisingly unsettling, and an antagonist I’ve grown to genuinely dislike, despite the the high amount of space between the player character and myself.

Overall

I quite like Titanium Court. I think it’s going to be one of those sleeper hits that doesn’t get quite enough attention until someone bigger than me picks it up, and it turns into a cult classic. It’s clever, well written, and manages to be genuinely unnerving at times despite its apparent simplicity.

That said, I’ve also found it weirdly draining, and that it requires my full focus. It’s not particularly snacky, or bite sized, or other nice words we use to compare things to food that is easily consumed. It’s more like ice cream. Try to consume it too fast—stuff too much of it into your mouth—and you’ll get a headache.

Still, I recommend it.

If you’re still on the fence, may I suggest watching the trailer here?

It also has a demo on Steam you can give a try.

May 30, 2026

He Is Coming

There are two types of games that will make me break out a spreadsheet. The first is the sort where there’s so much information, and I’m so invested in the game that I need external storage space. My brain has a lot of things in it, and only so much of it can be ciphers and codes.

The second is a game where I have become so frustrated by continual failure and by design choices that I either do not understand, do not agree with, or some combination of both that I intend to dissect the game to the best of my ability.

He Is Coming is one of the second.

Long time readers may have picked up that my write-ups are a bit formulaic. In part one, I introduce my feelings about a game (done that!). In part 2, I give a general overview of a game, mention its genre, and set up for the rest of the write-up. That’s where we are now, but I actually disagree with He Is Coming on what type of game it is.

He Is Coming calls itself a roguelite RPG auto battler. I take issue with two of those three labels, but as for why, let’s talk about how the game works.

At the start of a new run, the player spawns into a gridded map that they can explore. The map has a fog of war effect, so exploring reveals more of the map.

There are a few special types of things on the map, but the main two are opening chests, and fighting monsters.

(Side note: I’m glossing over the map, and the day/night cycle, and few other things, because they’re not very relevant to my main pain point with the game. I will say that the map is almost entirely an input only sort of thing. E.g. items you pick up almost never affect it.)

Monster battles are auto-battles. There isn’t too much to say here, as the combat is straight forward, and takes place automatically with zero player input. There are four combat stats: health, attack, armor, and speed. Both players and monsters have these stats. Attack is how much damage you deal per strike, health is much damage you can take, armor is a temporary health bar that refills after battles, and speed is who gets to go first.

When you defeat a monster, you get one gold.

There is a bit more complexity to this and how it interacts with items, but I’m not going to touch on it for now, because it’s not as relevant as items.

Chests are the standard 3-pick-1 roguelite item acquisition thing. They tend to spawn next to a single monster, but you don’t need to defeat that monster to open a chest.

The Problem

While I haven’t covered all the game’s features or mechanics yet, I’ve laid out enough to generally describe the “problem” I have with He Is Coming, and it has to do with the bosses at the end of the run.

A run in He Is Coming lasts 3 days. At the end of each day, you fight a mini-boss. At the end of day 3, you fight the zone boss. These zone bosses are always the same boss, and have much, much higher health pools and more difficult gimmicks than the mid-bosses.

Let’s start with Leshen and the Woodland Abomination as an example.

These are the two forms of the final boss of zone 1. He has far more health than any of the mini-bosses, and he hits much, much, harder then any of them. The end result is that the only way to beat him is to aggressively go over the top, and somehow have a higher armor+life total and higher attack than he does.

Here’s a (incomplete) list of weapons available in the Forest Zone. For the purposes of this discussion, just look at the Effective Attack column.

Forest Weapons	Base Attack	Effective Attack	Notes
Boom Stick	2	4
Brittlebark	4	3
Elderwood	1	2
Featherweight	2	3
Heart Drinker	1	2
Hidden Dagger	2	3	Weird One
Ironstone Greatsword	4	5
Razorthorn	1	4	Weird One
Redwood Rod	2	3
Spearshield	1	2
Sword of Hero	3	6	Set Item
Woodcutter	1	2	No really, you cannot build around this.
Battle Axe	2	3	Lesh has no armor
Bejeweled	1	12	Bad idea
Bloodmoon Dagger	2	8	Must get wounded for cap
Bloodmoon Sickle	5	6	Take 1 each turn

And here is the problem: The vast majority of these weapons are under 7 attack in a best case scenario. To win this fight, it’s almost entirely necessary to go over the top. Most of the pool simply cannot do that, starting much, much lower than required.

In short, most of these items are strategic traps.

Roguelites as a genre tend to be about working with you have, trying to make the best decision at any given point in time.

But the end bosses in He Is Coming break that design philosophy. They are so powerful that they close out entire sets of items and strategy designs, as those strategies simply cannot beat them. So instead of making the “best” choice, or trying different builds, I found it necessary to aggressively pre-plan and force a build to defeat them.

Here’s another example of this: the second zone boss, Swampland Hydra.

As you can see, I have died to this guy a LOT.

This writeup is already pretty long, so I won’t mince words here: I died a lot to the Hydra, before finally discovering a weapon that lets you remove status effects on yourself.

This led me to create a build that uses a status effect called Purity that heals and buffs on removal, and the aforementioned weapon to remove Purity and finally get a kill on this boss. Without using this strategy, the Hydra it builds up too many stacks of different types, and it simply felt impossible to win.

I cannot envision another build to do this. I’m sure it exists. But I’d have to look at every item in the pool, consider how to acquire them, pre-plan the build, and finally execute on it.

I don’t want to do that. I find roguelites fun when I can salvage a run from dumpster, or use knowledge to play around bad luck. But the bosses in He Is Coming just feel over tuned to the point that playing that way can never actually win.

One Other Possibility

I am open to the idea that I am just an idiot. That I have missed a critical portion of this game, or a core mechanic, or something that breaks this whole thing wide open. I know for a fact that I misunderstood how poison worked for almost 5 hours of playtime, leading to an incredibly frustrating loss.

But if I am, I don’t think I’m the only one.

Only about 40% of players have beat the first zone, with 8% beating the second. If I’m just stupid, I’m missing something, so are the vast majority of players.

I made the spreadsheet and those tables and the rest of this garbage because I wanted to see if I was missing something. I wanted to discover if I was misunderstanding a mechanic that would become clear if I just had a slightly bigger brain. A bit more external storage.

I don’t think I am.

Okay, but despite all of this, I actually really like the systems in He Is Coming

So, I’ve spent a lot of time so far discussing how He Is Coming forces a specific style of strategic play in order achieve victory, and how I don’t like that. Which is a bit unfortunate, because it means I’m not talking about the game’s interesting systems, or clever items.

My favorite set of items are probably the instruments, a set of items with the Symphony keyword, meaning that when one of them triggers, all the others trigger as well. It’s a fun idea, making it a bit of shame that they can’t do anything useful.

The backpack is also very neat.

Items trigger from left to right, and top to bottom, meaning it’s possible to set things up to resolve in clever ways. It’s another neat little system, though one I wish was a bit more meaningful to more builds.

Conclusion

I like most of the systems in He Is Coming, but right now I just can’t recommend it because of how it feels to play. It’s in early access, which means things might change, but it also means that they might not.

It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever played, but I’m left wishing it was something a bit different. In that sense, it actually reminds of Loop Hero, not just because both have the ye-olde CRT style, but because of the gap between the experience I was hoping for, and the experience I got is wider than I would have liked.

He is Coming is $15 on Steam. If you love the idea of a sort of puzzle roguelite, analyzing builds, and manipulating systems, you might love it. As for me, I’ve had my fill for the moment.

July 21, 2025

The Player Experience of Puzzles in Blue Prince

I was gonna put this in my Blue Prince write-up, but it’s kind of its own thing, so I’m pulling it out real quick.

While playing Blue Prince I wasn’t hitting the same wall of frustration I’ve hit with other puzzle games like Type Help or Return of the Obra Dinn, or even things like Braid and Escape Simulator.

I think Blue Prince is uniquely designed to prevent puzzle game frustrating. It uses its new dual roguelike/puzzle structure. It’s also interesting enough that I want to talk about it for a bit, and make my best guess about how the design of the game leads to avoiding this common emotional experience that I’ve found in other puzzle games.

There are three main elements that make Blue Prince less frustrating than other puzzle games.

1. Puzzles in Blue Prince are a bit easier than puzzles in many other dedicated puzzle games.

This doesn’t mean they’re not challenging, but that they’re not quite as a evil as they could be. Instead, the difficultly is placed into finding the puzzle.

2. The roguelike nature of the game. Most of the games puzzles are self-contained… But many puzzles require combinations of multiple rooms and other manipulations, so it’s not always possible to find them on any given day. The result is that sometimes if you find yourself stuck with a puzzle, you’ll run out of steps, and be forced to take a break.

During that break, you’ll play the roguelike portion again, and get to experience some level of success and enjoyment, so that by the time you return to the puzzle that blocked you before, you’re not feeling frustrated.

3. Finally, because of the type of game Blue Prince is, you don’t need to solve all the puzzles to make forward progress. Solving puzzles helps! But unlike many of the games above, in order to get to the end of the game, you don’t actually have to solve very many things, if any at all. Instead, you mostly need to collect information.

SMALL SPOILER

In fact, I think it’s mechanically possible to find Room 46 on Day 1. That said, I don’t think anyone is actually capable of doing that completely blind, but I bet it can be done, because you mostly just need to know what you need to do, and how to do it. But it’ll also still be a challenge, because it relies on being a very effective drafter.

I have a very specific memory of absolutely losing my mind at Return of the Obra Dinn, and that one moment colored a lot of my experience with the game. But because of the way that Blue Prince is set up, the game actively prevents you from ending up in the sort of fugue/frustration state of just raging at a puzzle that refuses to be solved.

I only ended up slamming my head into a wall over and over when I actively chose to do so. If I didn’t want to, it was entirely possible to avoid any given puzzle and return to it later.

In This Essay, I will

So let’s put it all together.

First, the game splits the satisfaction of puzzle solving into two parts: spotting the puzzle, and then solving it, but cranks down the difficultly of the solution part.

Second, because the game is a roguelike, it actively forces you to restart in situations where you hit a wall, or cannot make progress on a puzzle, diverting your attention from a frustrating experience temporarily.

Finally, it minimizes the number of puzzles that are truly needed to make forward progress, with many providing bonuses or hints, but not stacking them in a truly linear fashion.

The end result is that making progress is mostly dependent on collecting information, not necessarily solving puzzles.

A Quick Caveat

I’m writing this having seen the credits for Blue Prince, but not having done… well, quite a large number of things actually. I have around 50 pages of notes for this game, and I suspect there are a huge number of things I haven’t put together yet!

So it’s possible I’m wrong about a few things above, especially the difficulty of later puzzles. But I still think the rest is a pretty fair observation about the roguelike nature of the game, and nature of forward progress lets Blue Prince avoid some of the frustration the genre is known for.

April 28, 2025
Type Help

I’m going to save both of us some time here. Did you like Return of the Obra Dinn? Did you like it a lot?

Yes? Great. Click this link and you will have an enjoyable several hours, and it will not cost you a penny.

Okay, time to deal with the rest of you.

Somehow it’s become “Free Web Based Indie Games That Are Novel Takes On Existing Systems” month. It doesn’t exactly roll of the tongue, but just like Dragonsweeper, Type Help is a FWBIGTANTOES.

I did not intend for that acronym to include BIG TAN TOES. Now that I am looking at it, it’s making me increasingly uncomfortable, so let’s move on.

Type Help is a mystery puzzle game played via a command line, all about deducing information. Specifically, it’s about deducing the names of a series of transcribed audio files, all which follow a specific naming convention.

Since it’s a puzzle game, and part of the puzzle is figuring out what the puzzle is, from here on out there will be heavy spoilers. Consider it your last chance to experience it on your own.

Here There Be Spoilers

Type Help is a murder mystery. As mentioned above, your primary goal is to deduce the names of various text files, all audio transcriptions of a house in which 12 strangers were found dead, with no clues as to who they were, or how they got there. Even more mysteriously, the individual working the case in question also died.

So the main gameplay is guessing the names of files. After you’re given a few starting points, it becomes clear that the title of each file follows a simple naming convention, like this:

02-EN-1-6-7-10

The first number indicates time in the sequence, the second set of letters indicates a location, and the remaining sequence of numbers indicates who of the 12 strangers were present in the scene. For example, early scenes will often end with characters saying things like “Person #1, please come with me to the Billiards Room” and so you can deduce that a file might exist named something like 03-BI-1-8. Typing that in will unlock the file.

Of course, it’s obviously not all that simple. Sometimes someone else will have already been in the billiards room, so you’ll need to deduce who that was. Sometimes people don’t leave a room they’re in. Ultimately, it’s a big puzzle of “Who was where, when?”

My Thoughts On It

I have roughly the same problems with Type Help that I had with Return of the Obra Dinn, but a different set of praise. I consider Type Help a far more compelling mystery—and more interesting sets of character dynamics—than Obra Dinn.

Unfortunately, just like Return of the Obra Dinn, once general gist of the mystery became clear, I didn’t find it particularly compelling to puzzle out a lot more of the busy work, and get the “true ending.” In both games, I got about 60-70% of the way through, and hit a wall where I was no longer having any fun.

Some people really enjoy color coding elaborate spreadsheets.

I am not one of them.

For Return of the Obra Dinn, I put the work in to finish it out. For Type Help, I just looked at the spoilers in the comment section, and frankly, I think I made the right choice. The initial puzzles, worldbuilding, and unfolding mystery were interesting. But it would have taken me an additional 5+ hours to find the finale and “big reveal,” and I bet it wouldn’t have felt worth it.

I did enjoy a large portion of Type Help. I think it’s good. But it’s like a cake that’s just a bit too large, with frosting a bit too rich. Maybe it’s somewhat dry in parts, preventing me from finishing the whole thing.

_{BIG TAN TOES}

March 19, 2025
Grindstone

Grindstone offers a view of an alien reality, a world where mobile games are not the wallet-consuming apex predators that they are in ours. That doesn’t mean their evolution was entirely disrupted.

Just as all animals become crabs, all mobile games have at least some things in common. Clean UI. Simple, easy to learn mechanics, that can be stretched like taffy. Bite-sized levels and gameplay that can be picked up, and put down whenever you want.

Grindstone is pretty much a masterclass in all of these.

The basics are simple. You’re dropped onto a grid, and you draw lines through matching colored enemies, then punch the go button to watch our hero Jorj murder them all in a surprisingly bloody spree of cartoon violence.

Of course, if you get a chain of at least 10, you’ll add Grindstone to the board after the combo, and linking through a grindstone allows you to swap the creep color you’re currently chaining. After taking out enough enemies, you can chain yourself out via the exit, and complete the level.

Also, some enemies become active at the end of a turn, meaning they’ll attack you if you end a chain near them.

Oh, and then after a few levels, it adds wood debris, which needs a chain of 3 to break though. Then rocks that need a chain of 5. Then enemies that need a chain of 10. Then….

You get the idea. It’s the standard pattern: a slow incremental addition of mechanics and rules, spread like butter on toast. If anything, I’d like those mechanics to be introduced a bit faster than they actually are, but it’s not really a big issue.

Oh, and there are gravestones. I hate the gravestones.

There’s also a bunch of side elements, with a whole crafting system for getting better gear, and refilling said gear. These mechanics would be aggravating if I had to buy StoneBucks each time, but since this is a real video game (and not a mobile game leech), it’s fine. I do wish it was possible to automatically refill my health, but again, at least I don’t have to spend real money on it.

All of this aside, I’ve been playing it on PC, which is clearly not its native environment. Some of the UI elements are a little wonky on PC, and it’s clear touch controls are the intended experience.

Which makes it kind of a shame that to play it in its intended environment, you’d have to subscribe to Apple Arcade.

After all, the reason that Grindstone doesn’t have to devour your wallet is because it was almost certainly built and paid for as part of Apple’s of attempt to transform our current macro-transaction nightmare into an “All Software Is A Service” hell. So maybe it’s less of a view into an alternate reality, and instead a peek into a different-and-still-bad future for gaming.

But right now, it’s just a good game. And it’s $5 on Steam for the next few days. So if you want a small, simple puzzle game, now would be the time to pick it up. Slay some creeps, and try not to think much about what it says about our Anime PNG present, or our SasS future.

July 8, 2024