When is an incremental game not an incremental game? When it’s a roguelite fighting platformer! Only… it’s still an incremental game.

You do fight enemies, mainly by standing close to them. Which you have to do a lot because you lose health if you aren’t standing near anyone. Kill baddies, and you get currency. When you inevitably die, which you will do a lot, you spend your money improving your skills, like more HP or doing more damage, or making exploding enemies damage other enemies, or (later) enabling special moves that do, well, special things.

You also unlock cards that you can equip to augment your skills further, and unlock more equip slots to allow several to be used at once.

Naturally, there’s a huge skill tree to unlock and fill up, and as you get further into the game on each run it gets harder and there are bosses and you eventually learn why you exist and, well, spoilers.

Ignoble is very slick, a bit slow to get into, but once you’ve powered up enough it becomes one of those “I’m a walking tank” games where early stages and whizz by in seconds and the screen explodes in flashes and blood and collectables. Not a very long game, but certainly an enjoyable one.

Yes, another incremental number-go-up game to suck my time. Just like Diggin and Loot Loop and Shelldiver and Unboxathon. This one, however, is based around the exciting world of lottery scratch cards. Buy a card! Scratch it off! Possibly win money! Wash some plates if you run out of money! Buy more tickets with your money! Earn enough to buy more expensive tickets with greater rewards! Unlock the skill tree to tilt luck in your favour and increase your possibly winnings! Repeat it over and over again!

But why do this? Because numbers go up. There’s something that tickles the brain just right. Scritchy Scratchy manages to do it for long enough, and progresses in a pleasing way with little of the “grind for ages” sticking points that some such games sometimes have. And when you unlock the various automations, it really takes off.

Perhaps the graphics on the cards could have been a bit better, but other than that – a fine example of the genre.

I was wondering how to describe this game, as it is very unusual and seems to defy proper categorisation. Eventually, I managed to come up with this:

It’s like if Bad North and Into The Breach made a baby with Puzzle Quest after reading Alice in Wonderland in The Office on LSD. With CGA graphics.

To see if that was really correct, I asked ChatGPT to tell me which game I was thinking of when given that description. To which, it said Titanium Court! So there you go. Titanium Court is exactly that. Well done me.

To expand a little, the main gameplay element is that of a match-3 puzzle game. However, there’s a whole metagame surrounding it. The game starts with you, wrest from your life, arriving in what seems to be a medieval court. Only it isn’t medieval as people wear businesswear, are obsessed with baseball (or, rather, the concepts of it but not the game itself), and you’re declared the Queen. Oh, and you’re in a perpetual daily war with… well, that isn’t clear.

Each day starts with some wandering of your court, grabbing breakfast, chatting with some folk, and then “after breakfast, the court goes to war”. War consists of a grid of various types of landscape, like mountains and trees. You start at the bottom, and there’s a boss at the top. You select a region of land from the row above you, and that opens out into a familiar match-3 layout. Win, and you then choose from the next row, until you reach the boss.

Each “battle” has two phases. The first is where you swipe the tiles around to match them, with different tiles generating different resources like wood or food. The “board” also has some enemy units which can also, sometimes, be erased by matching. The trick here is to both get rid of enemies, but also generate enough resources of the right kinds to facilitate the second phase.

Here, you have a timeline which shows the points at which various events, such as enemy spawns or attacks, will happen. You can then use “cards” (which you start with, or find or buy as you play) which allow you to “buy” things, like units or skills, with your resources. Once happy, you start the battle and it plays out in front of you. Defeat everyone, or at least survive until the end of the timeline, and you win.

There’s a roguelite element here too. You might reach the boss, but you’ll likely be woefully underprepared to win. Which boss on each run is seemingly random anyway. Thankfully, there are things you can do between battles in and around your court which can unlock buffs and other skills. Things like winning in certain ways, or discovering things in the court, or, well, I won’t spoil it. Half the fun of the game is just figuring out what the hell is going on. There are mysteries to solve (or not), friends and enemies to make, and puzzles to solve.

I don’t think I’ve ever played a game like Titanium Court. Well, like bits of it, sure, but actually like it? No. It is incredibly addictive with it’s just-one-more-run draw, plus your need to try and make sense of everything. Why are you the Queen? Who is the real Queen? Why so some characters literally run out of dialogue and then get stuck in a loop and are then put in the basement out of the way like they’re broken automatons? Why does nobody believe that cars exist? It’s fantastic, in all senses of the word.

Many years ago, I was obsessed with a game called Diggers on the Acorn Archimedes. It’s was a slow paced mining game, sort of a bit like if you gave Lemmings some digging tools and got them to find gemstones below the earth in increasingly deep mineshafts. Since then, I’ve always gravitated towards games that scratch a similar itch – Miner Dig Deep, SteamWorld Dig, Mr Driller, Dig Dig Dino, and so on.

Diggin is like a hyperactive mix of these, in the guise of (yet another) incremental collecty numbers-go-up game. Your miner starts with rubbish tools, can barely dig down a handful of layers before running out of drill fuel, and nets almost no money from his gains. Naturally, you invest the money (and as time goes on, other resources) into filling a skill tree and getting better at digging (diggin?). Better equipment = more money = better equipment. The magic gameplay loop of the incremental game genre.

I’m sure you can guess how this plays out, so I’ll skip to the end. Eventually, the screen becomes a blur of tools, powers, explosions, items and detritus as you go as deep as you can go, revealing… well, a spoiler which requires some specifics to deal with and then you complete the game.

Satisfying, over the top, but very simple – Diggin is great.

I know! It’s yet another incremental game! But! This one has a turtle in it!

It’s also more action focussed than most of the others I’ve played recently. As in, you actually have control over your turtle while he dives for minerals and traps octopusseseses in bubbles.

Minerals that need more and more hits to collect. Octopuses that need more and more bubbles to catch. Depths that require more and more air for you to survive in them. So, being an incremental game, you of course get money for what you have collected and can spend this on your massive skill tree, boosting your oxygen tanks, your mineral collecting ability, and, er, your “bubble power”. Improve yourself enough, and you get to try the next region of water with “harder” things to deal with.

Eventually, you become a sea-sweeping monster of a turtle, with starfish helpers and lightning bubbles and seemingly unlimited breath, destroying and/or collecting everything with ease. Until the next deepest region.

It’s a cute and fun take on the clicker genre, and as you get more money (and more ways to get even more money) your turtle’s little deserted island soon fills up with more and more turtles so you’re always seeing progress and that part of your brain which reacts to the sort of endorphins released by numbers slightly increasing is massaged pleasingly.

(Oh, and I think the name of the game might be a pun on “Helldivers”. Ho ho!)