Mind: Path to Thalamus Really Makes You Think

There's a good chance you haven't heard of Mind: Path to Thalamus. The name is perhaps not the most memorable, and I'm guessing the marketing budget of a small indie studio from Spain is fairly modest. I came across it by chance, and while at first I felt it aped Dear Esther a little too much, the story premise, first person puzzles and stunning surreal visuals make this game well worth a look.

A daily experience for any SimCity citizen

It starts off with a bang. The bang of a tornado throwing a boat at you, to be specific. You are put in the feet of a nameless (but not silent) protagonist reliving the natural disaster that took his sister Sophia's life when he was a child... or is it a more recent tsunami that killed his daughter of the same name? The game's narration intentionally blurs these two events together, and we soon discover that this man is in a coma, unable to do anything but mentally kick himself for not being able to protect his daughter, as well as tempting fate by naming her after his tragically dead sister. Don't worry, it's meant to be confusing.

For the sake of my own sanity, I hope I 
never dream of this game

The disorienting experience doesn't stop there. After the intro, Mind guides the player through a maze of Antichamber-style perspective tricks, before spitting them out into a paradoxically watery desert that feels like a forgotten painting by Dali. At this point, it abruptly becomes a puzzle game as you navigate collapsed pillars and steps leading to nowhere. The game never holds your hand or gives you an objective marker - you discover what you need to do purely through exploration, for example working out that the mirrors dotting the ruined landscape of concrete unlock paths to the next area - either by directing beams of light that cause some thorny vines blocking your way to swing open, or the mirror just teleports you to the next area when you approach it.

You need the Blue Key Ball

As you proceed, the puzzles do away with mirrors and focus on something a little more bizarre and certainly, to my knowledge, quite original. Throughout the game you encounter football-sized balls made of blue wire. It's never clear what exactly they're supposed to be - something decorative crafted by his daughter? A microcosm of his scrambled comatose brain? Whatever they are, they are your most frequent tool - again in a rather surreal fashion. The majority of the puzzles involve small areas in a level that change something about the world if the player, or the wire-ball is in that space. For example, standing in a circle of three trees can make the giant sphere of fog blocking your way dissipate into the air around you. If you leave the circle of trees, the foggy dome will reappear - unless you leave a certain blue object behind. Mind gradually introduces the player to other "circles" with puzzle-solving functions: florescent white flowers turn day into night and activate gateways that will teleport you about the level; henge-like circles of small rocks make it rain and raise wooden platforms as if borne up by floodwaters; and late in the game cogs frozen in mid air reverse the flow of time (I won't spoil how). Mind is at its most enjoyable when lots of these elements come together: often when you explore a new area the route to the next is perplexing, until you spot a way to interact with your environment via these unique puzzle mechanics. Solving these puzzles evokes a feeling of smug self-satisfaction seldom found outside of the Portal games. The game doesn't achieve the near-perfection of Valve's first person puzzler - a lot of the early stuff in particular was just a bit too easy for my liking - but Mind's best gameplay riddles are very rewarding when you successfully unravel them.

Magic night flowers, with a distant view of a portal

In between levels the narrator pipes up with some reminiscences on his sister growing up, ruminations on his comatose state that he is somehow aware of, and a near-endless mine of self-pity. These moments of exposition are easily the weakest components of Mind: Path to Thalamus. Tragedy and traumatic events are by no means off limits in video games - another comparison that frequently came to mind was Papo & Yo - but the wooden delivery of every piece of dialogue left me cringing. The narrator breaks the game's immersion every time he intrudes upon the action, making me muse more on how limited their time in the recording studio must have been, than the crushing sense of loss and self-torment after the death of a loved one. If, as I suspect, this is based on the real life experiences of one of the developers or someone close to them, I have no doubt it was devastating and profoundly life-changing. None of those feelings are conveyed through the tone-deaf voice acting; its only redeeming quality is that the game's sounds effects occasionally drown it out.

Can I suggest a marketing tagline? "Orgasmic lighting"

Fortunately, these breaks in immersion are not that frequent, leaving the player free to explore. With the exception of an underground section in the middle of the game, every environment is gorgeous, from the endless deserts at the start, to the calm grassy hills and autumnal forests later on. I've laced this review with images from the game - none of them do justice to the experience of moving around and admiring Mind's bizarre dreamscape and gorgeous skybox. The pace is suitably lackadaisical, as you move at a sedate pace from puzzle to puzzle, wandering from one serene location to another. Dear Esther is often given the snarky descriptor "walking simulator"; this game deserves it much more, but as a compliment this time. No other game has so consistently assaulted me with natural beauty.

The great views are often obscured by the weather effects caused by the "wire-ball" puzzles I described earlier, particularly the fog and rain mechanics. Given how pretty the game is without these elements, this might sound bothersome. As I progressed through the game though, it became increasingly tempting to interpret these changes to the game world as symbols of the protagonist's state of mind. Permit me to get literary here (hey, that English degree has to be good for something, right?) From the grasslands onwards, the protagonist is striving towards a distant great tree he calls "the Thalamus". One particularly wide open area in this part of the game starts you off in a dense fog, with only the odd broken pillar to gauge where you are and guide you forward. When I eventually found the wire-ball and removed it from a circle of trees, the fog cleared, revealing the Thalamus far off in the distance. To me at least, the fog symbolised the self-doubt and aimlessness created by the loss of his sister/daughter, and only by latching onto a memento of her could he see clearly and regain a sense of purpose, i.e. journeying to the Thalamus. There are lots of opportunities for discovering deeper meanings, even if they are in the eye of the beholder. I only wish these open-ended metaphors were the primary form of storytelling here, rather than the aforementioned uninspiring voice overs.

Crappy narration aside, I had relatively few negative moments with this game. A couple of times I got stuck on the level geometry - one instance of which got in the way of a stunning set-piece towards the end of the game - and I had jump through some frustrating hoops initially to get it running properly (I shouldn't have to edit a text file to get the right resolution for my display!). These are minor stumbling blocks. The majority of my time spent with  Mind: Path to Thalamus involved tinkering with some great puzzles, pondering the pain of losing someone close to you and gazing awestruck at yet another splendid view. You should think very hard about playing it.

Final Score: 8/10
A copy of the game was supplied by fingers333 during the last Steam sale.