THE MAW THE MEDIUM SERIES

At that point it becomes very clear which parts mattered, and which bits could have been a line but ended up a chapter. There are at least three substantial threads that feel like they could have held their own, but coiled together they heave and strain against each other until the very end explains what's really going on. There is a good story here, but again: just too much. Like the mechanics there's a scattershot 'didn't know where to stop' feel to the plotting. It isn't easy to die but if you do you'll have to retread entire chunks. You can't save manually and so just have to hope the background auto-saving will be close behind you. The checkpointing and saving is also pretty bad. Except I couldn't pick anything up until I went back to the start, triggered the initial step and then went back to the thing I was just at. Another time I died at the end of a level and, knowing what to do, went straight to the stuff I needed. I solved what I thought was a good puzzle but wasn't able to complete it until the game walked me, step by step, through dialogue for each part of the puzzle in turn. It's a game that isn't prepared to be played any way other than intended and sometimes has to point really hard at what that intent is. One stealth section let me die repeatedly until a prompt finally appeared to tell me I should use a mechanic that had never been a part of stealth before. In one single section, an arrow appears over your head to tell you where to look. Spectral butterflies appear to lead you around. Sometimes it feels like some things have been added to fix some of these issues. Death or escape are the only resolutions and you don't know which one is coming until it happens.

'Press the right stick to hold your breath' the game explains at one point without ever clarifying when and how this might help.

He's basically invisible most of the time and there's no clear indication of when he can see you or when you're in danger. (At one point I had to electrocute him to get past which I don't really think is how ghosts work.) These moments also lack as much threat as they do narrative purpose. Either because he rocks up for no clear reason, or because you have to solve some arbitrary puzzle to progress. These Maw sections are often big non sequitur moments.

It strips the fun out of exploring when you realize finding something boils down to when you're meant to, not when you actually do. There's rarely much agency as a player - the gameplay doesn't serve the story, but rather controls it, using object picking puzzles and treasure hunts to meter it out. This odd structure of objects only becoming relevant when you find them in the right order is a constant theme: gameplay and puzzles acting to fence you into a path so you can receive a tour in the way the guide intended. A few minutes later I found some arbitrary object that then created a breadcrumb trail to all the areas I'd previously discovered with the objects I couldn't touch before, now able to trigger sequential pieces of a story reward.

THE MAW THE MEDIUM SERIES

At one point I entered and explored a room, wandering between a series of clearly important areas - tables covered with items and so on - that were inert, and apparently contained nothing of use. There's a big lack of freedom to what you're actually able to do. While there are some good puzzles, there's often a sparsity of things to interact with, making progress a simple job of matching up what little you're given, in the order you're meant to.

The maw the medium