Mai: Child of Ages

I came into Mai: Child of Ages fully expecting a cute, forgettable action-platformer to blow through between bigger releases. What I got was something messier and more interesting than that, a five-person Italian studio swinging for Ocarina of Time and landing somewhere closer to a clever rough draft. That gap between ambition and execution is the whole conversation here. The core mechanic is a dual-age system built around the Uroboro Stone, a shapeshifting relic that lets you flip between child Mai and adolescent Mai across fractured timelines. Young Mai moves like a nimble platformer character: she runs, jumps, dives, and uses Time Seeds as tools and weapons, including a boomerang seed for ranged attacks, a bomb tether, a bouncy launch seed, and a grapple seed for traversal. Older Mai drops the jump and dive in exchange for sword, shield, boomerang blade, and bow combat, a trade-off that some reviewers found logically odd but which actually reinforces the game's themes about what growing up costs you. Restoring a bridge in the past carries forward into the future timeline. That two-layer puzzle design is the game at its best, and the mid-game sequences where you're rewinding and fast-forwarding objects in specific sequences to unlock hidden routes are genuinely satisfying in a way that surprised me. Combat is where the shooter in me starts twitching. Dodge, block, attack, unlock new Uroboro forms as you progress. The input response on PC is acceptable and the boss fights stay inventive throughout, but regular enemy encounters turn repetitive fast, especially in the back third. The default button layout is awkward too, with attack on A and dodge tucked onto a trigger in a way that feels backwards after any modern action game. There is no full control remapping reported, which is a real omission given how precision-dependent some sections get. The camera locks to fixed perspectives in certain rooms and actively fights you. The stamina bar governing both running and swimming in the same pool also creates some cheap underwater deaths that patch work could fix. On PC the pop-in and frame dips that plagued the Switch version are much less severe, so if you have a choice of platform, this is the one. What keeps Mai: Child of Ages from being a write-off is that the stuff surrounding the gameplay holds together better than the gameplay itself. The painterly low-poly art shifts from warm saturated forests and colorful islands to bleak industrial ruins in a way that does real narrative work without a cutscene. Eric Ferrari's soundtrack across over 50 tracks is the kind of score that makes a mid-tier exploration loop feel weightier than it deserves. The story, told through environmental details and fragmented memories rather than lore dumps, has a bittersweet payoff that respects its own complexity. The local co-op mode, where the second player controls enemies to assist in battles, is a weird and specific design choice that actually adds a fun chaotic option for couch sessions. Free DLC chapters are confirmed in development, which gives the game some forward momentum post-launch. This is not a game for someone who wants tight action combat or a robust challenge system. The puzzle-platforming is the reason to be here, and patience is the price of admission. On a modest PC spec this runs fine, controller recommended and practically required given the movement tech. Hardcore action fans will bounce off the clunky precision sections. But if you can tolerate some jank in exchange for a genuinely affecting story and clever time-layer puzzles at a low entry price, there is more here than the anonymous box art suggests.

Fred · Scout Team

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