Tuesday 23 September 2014

Mind: Path to Thalamus

Mind: Path to Thalamus

For the past few years, a handful of developers has been experimenting with the idea of first-person games that don’t rely on guns and gore. These alternative approaches have taken numerous forms. Some opt for horror, while others emphasise survival. Many choose a combination of puzzling and narrative to hold the player’s interest, putting varying degrees of emphasis on one or the other. Mind: Path to Thalamus is a little different. Its weapon of choice is awe.

Thalamus features puzzles and narrative too, but it sets them up within astonishing environmental design that will leave you gazing in slack-jawed delight. It’s one of the very few examples of the form that could realistically dispense with any player interaction whatsoever; puzzles, storytelling – it could drop them all and it would still be absolutely worth your time to investigate. But it contains these elements as well, for better and worse.

ASRock Z97M Anniversary


Last’s month’s cover feature sported a budget PC that included Intel’s Pentium G3258 Anniversary Edition CPU, which we’d overclocked to 4.6GHz. This low-price CPU can provide a great way of getting some decent grunt for under £60, and Asus has recently offered BIOS updates for all its cheap boards with H81 chipsets, which enable them to access unlocked multipliers. One downside of this route, though, is that you need a way to flash the BIOS in order for such a board to work with the Pentium G3258. However, ASRock has just presented an alternative route, via a cut-price, full-on Z97 motherboard – the Z97M Anniversary.

Asus Z97I Plus

Asus Z97I Plus

The motherboard market is inundated with mini-ITX models these days, and small form factor PC fans have never had it so good. Thankfully, not all the mini boards that sport Intel’s new Z97 chipset are expensive either. In fact, Asus has reduced the price of its mainstream Z97 mini-ITX offering considerably, compared to its Z77 and Z87 counterparts. The Z97I-Plus retails for just £106, making it one of the cheapest Z97 mini-ITX motherboards available at the moment.