Wolverine debuted with review scores much lower than Insomniac’s past string of games, including three Spider-Man titles. In fact, Wolverine is one of the lowest-scoring first-party PlayStation games in years with its 78 Metascore . There is a lot of dissection among critics about what’s gone wrong, but one issue comes up more than others.

It’s the idea that Wolverine , by default, holds players’ hands too much when it comes to navigation and occasionally even combat, littering the game with objective markers and auto-completing quick-time events.

One aspect of the game has already been turned into a meme, a so-called “fart gas” trail, a path of smoke on the screen that leads to a specific location, a term coined by The Washington Post’s Gene Park that has now become part of Wolverine’s lexicon. The idea is that it’s just yet another overly-intrusive guide, and while some of the hand-holding in the game can be turned off in settings, the fart gas stays.

Now, Insomniac has commented on the situation. The studio’s Director of Community and Marketing, James Stevenson, wrote this on Twitter in regard to the issue:

“The scent trail isn’t always on. It represents Logan’s canon mutant super senses and elite tracking ability. It only is there when he’s tracking a specific scent / sound (a person, whisky, or another clue scent) - story/mission moments or when he catches whiff of a collectible.”

While Wolverine is often not tracking things, you can see from all the situations above that it’s going to appear in quite a few scenarios. Some have pointed out that other games use similar tracking abilities with “scent” paths, or other such explanations. However, the difference here is that almost all of those other games are open-world where navigation is more difficult, as opposed to Wolverine , which is a linear game and the answer is often going to be “go straight.”

Fans are suggesting a way to turn this off, but that complicates things as it’s part of gameplay, and it wasn’t designed to work without it in many instances. So turning it off may break some of the missions or gameplay. Even a toggle wouldn’t really work either for similar reasons. So no, I’m not sure if the trail can be patched in a way that isn’t just modifying it, by making it more transparent or a different shape that isn’t “fart gas,” or something like that.

The question is whether all this chatter and less-than-enthusiastic reviews will translate into lower sales for the game, which is ultimately what matters to Sony. Still, debates about gas trails are not really what they want to see in the lead-up to the game’s launch next week. Only then will audiences get to see if this really is annoying, or if critics have overblown it a bit. But yes, I would predict some sort of patch, even if it’s not turning it off or fully replacing it.

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