DeVuego

It’s a move that illuminates the game’s greatest weakness: it holds back. This manifests in the game’s puzzles: concepts are introduced and dropped before they reach a peak difficulty, and though the last few levels are fiendish, they’re missing a lot of the groundwork that the game laid early on. It’s also much too afraid to let its images speak for themselves without narration, too afraid to let the player find and deal with that emotional impact. Mind: Path to Thalamus is, at times, messy, but it’s a beautiful mess, one that still exhibits powerful moments of emotional impact that are so true to the game and the medium that it’s almost painful. If the narrator is the creator—or vice versa—he seems afraid of letting the player and himself falter emotionally or logically, as though there were something wrong with offering a player a piece of a broken heart.