The game centers on the extraterrestrial Frank and a purple, amorphous creature called The Maw, who have crash-landed their spacecraft on an alien planet.

The game begins with Frank, a pacifist bipedal alien, and The Maw, a purple one-eyed creature with small- medium teeth, both having been captured by the Galactic Bounty Hunters.

[1] Twisted Pixel Games announced in June 2008 its plans to release The Maw as it's the first original title for the company.

[5] The Maw soundtrack was composed by Winifred Phillips and produced by Winnie Waldron,[6] who together designed the music interactivity for the game.

[7] Twisted Pixel brought three new levels for the game as downloadable content, Brute Force, River redirect, and The Speeder Lane.

Once the game was out of our hands, we went back to the drawing board to design everything from scratch, but we obviously had a lot of half-finished pieces on the cutting room floor that we could leverage".

Therefore, plans were made for the downloadable content to be dubbed "Deleted Scenes"; levels that take place inside the story of the main game.

[25][26] IGN's Erik Brudvig praised the game, citing colorful graphics and easy yet fun gameplay.

[27] TeamXbox's Dale Nardozzi lauded the gameplay, visuals and audio: "Roll [them] together and you have one very tasty yumyum, not to mention one of the better original IP’s to hit Xbox Live Arcade in awhile [sic?]".

[17] Game Revolution's Eduardo Reboucas also agreed: "Enjoy it while it lasts, though, because Maw's stay isn't a very long one".