Brinemaw

What is Brinemaw

Brinemaw is an open coast you walk from end to end, seen from above, with a slingshot in your hand and a lantern you have not found yet. It begins at the docks of Pebblewick, where Old Marla hands you a weapon and a warning, and it ends nine thousand paces east in Ferrigo’s Vault, where the Heart of Brinemaw sits behind the drowned captain himself. Between them lie seven regions — the shore, the boardwalks of Widow’s Stair, the firefly wood of Thornhollow, the biting water of Fenmallow Mire, the black caves of Dripstone Hollow, the silent Drowned Bell — and six gates, each one shut until you work out what opens it.

Every gate has its own trap, and none of them is a fight. The first is a cliff ladder tied off above: shoot the three rope knots and it drops. The second is a stone slab that only a boulder on a pressure plate will lift. Then five torches that must be lit in the order they showed you, a sluice wheel missing three brass cogs, four singing crystals with a five-note song to repeat, and finally four tide levers set to the pattern carved on the wall beside them. The creatures between the gates are there to make the walking cost something: crabs and rats near the shore, bats and wisps deeper in, spiders that crouch before they pounce, and skeletons at the end. Kill them for coins and experience, or walk around them — the gates are the game, not the fights.

How to play

1. Walk with WASD or the arrow keys, aim with the mouse and click or press space to fire. On a phone, slide your thumb anywhere on the left half of the screen to move; the slingshot aims itself — at the puzzle in front of you first (a rope knot, a torch, a crystal), and at the nearest creature otherwise, and FIRE, DASH and ACT sit on the right.
2. Press E, or the ACT button, when the prompt appears above something: Old Marla, a signpost, a chest, a lever, the sluice wheel or a locked gate. Signs are worth reading — each one tells you what the next gate wants before you get there.
3. Stone cairns line the safe road. Walk into one and it lights: your hearts refill and the game saves, so you can close the page and come back to Continue. If a creature kills you, you rise at the last cairn you lit and keep everything you had.
4. Shift, or the DASH button, throws you forward for a fifth of a second and makes you briefly untouchable — it is how you cross a room of skeletons and how you leave the captain’s ground slam. It needs about a second to recharge.
5. The 💡 button at the top right is the hint. You start with three. Each one names, in plain words, the next thing to do — which torch comes next in the order, which lever is set wrong, where the cog you are missing lies — and rings the spot itself with a pulsing marker for sixteen seconds, with an arrow at the edge of the screen when the spot is off in the distance. A hint never solves the puzzle for you: it points, and you still have to shoot, push or pull. H does the same on a keyboard.

Strategies that work

• Captain Ferrigo telegraphs his slam: he stops, winds up for most of a second, then lands where you were standing. Dash out of the circle and he spends the next two and a half seconds stunned — and every shot that lands on a stunned captain counts double. That window is worth more than any amount of careful poking.
• The score is coins times ten, plus a hundred and fifty per level, plus two points for every second you finish under the hour, plus a thousand for the Heart. The clock is the biggest single number in that sum, so the run that wanders less scores more — but dying costs you nothing except time.
• The lantern in the torch-ring chest almost doubles how far you can see, from two hundred and fifty paces to four hundred and thirty. Dripstone Hollow is the darkest region on the coast and it comes right after: fetch the lantern before you go in, not after.
• The bog boots in the hut chest in Fenmallow stop the poison water hurting you and stop it slowing you down. Without them every second standing in a pool costs a heart and you walk at about three quarters of your speed, which is exactly when the spiders pounce.
• Every kill is experience, and every level gives two more hearts and a point of slingshot damage. Arriving at the captain at level five instead of level three means you hit for eight instead of six and can take four more hits — worth ten minutes of clearing the Drowned Bell before you knock on his door.

A little history

The shape of Brinemaw belongs to a lineage of top-down adventures where the world is one continuous map rather than a series of levels, and where the obstacle is nearly always a lock rather than an enemy: a bridge that needs raising, a torch sequence, a key in the wrong hands. What that structure does well is turn walking into reading — you cross a region, you notice a wheel with empty sockets, and three regions of exploring later the sockets mean something. The coast itself is drawn rather than tiled: the ground is a field of overlapping soft blobs, thresholded to find the water line and coloured by whichever region is nearest, which is why the shore curves and pockets instead of stepping. The dark works the same way, a single black sheet punched through by whatever is giving off light — you, a lit torch, a cairn, a crystal, the captain. Pebblewick, Ferrigo and the Heart of Brinemaw are invented; no real hoard, coast or captain is behind them.

Frequently asked questions