The word ‘pretty’ isn’t one that comes up too often in PC Gamer. The games themselves are often full of monsters designed to be as unappealing as possible, while the lumpen protagonists are seldom any better. Games like Infinity Nikki and the cosy games movement are making inroads into prettiness, but that’s never going to stop the industrial design of motherboards and GPU cards from allowing form to follow function.
And while internal components may be utilitarian, peripherals are often worse. When was the last time you saw an attractive printer? External drives tend to be nothing more than black rectangles—though recently we’ve seen them in red and silver too—so it’s actually something of a thrill to open a package that contains a drive shaped like a little pillow, perfect for resting your head on if you’re about 12-inch tall, and which is such a pretty shade of blue that, combined with its speed, it feels as if Sonic the Hedgehog has been frozen in carbonite.
