A first impression of Thumper is peculiar confrontation with the more lurid parts of the human subconscious. Suspiciously organic tentacles cascading in frightening patterns, an oppressive bombardment of war drums, a metallic and menacing beetle sliding at the speed of sound—it’s a projection of what would happen if someone inserted a large needle into your skull and specifically extracted the primal terror that drives basic survival. This is a bold conclusion for a game primarily interested in pressing buttons in the correct sequence, but it’s an enduring feeling not subject to rationalization or denial. Thumper literally looks like hell.
Watching Thumper operate reveals its own set of alarming considerations. Games of Thumpers ilk haven’t been known to focus on pure (or perceived) speed. Frequency and Amplitude may seem like its closest cousins, but Thumper actually has more in common with Wipeout’s trance-inducing zone mode or Dyad’s distressing commitment to velocity. It’s as much about speed and efficiency as it is maintaining rhythm alongside a vicious beat. This manifests with Thumper’s beetle either careening off walls into a violent explosion or a strange and dangerous looking correspondence with its narrow environment. Skilled play is rewarded with a congruous, though still threating, landscape.
Through the first five of its nine levels, Thumper introduces an escalating series of rules. The potency of input can’t be overstated, especially since Thumper only makes use of a single button. The most basic instruction is tapping X as soon as your beetle goes over (and makes a beat on) a brightly-lit neon rectangle. Soon, you’re told to push the analog stick in the opposite direction as soon as the beetle makes contact with a red-colored curve in the wall. Later, holding X down will ensure safety as you cross through red barriers. Holding up after hitting a beat block will extend the beetle’s wings and allow flight into blue arches for additional points. Every action is performed in sync with the beat hammering in the background.
Thumper doesn’t waste time getting creative with its tricks. Spike pits demand to be flown over. Successive opposing curves in the wall arrive with breakneck speed. Before long there are multiple lanes to contend with, along with god damn snakes appearing out of the ether to clog the lanes. It’s important to note that, while a flawless performance is pretty, Thumper doesn’t demand absolute perfection. Except for in a handful of situations, you don’t need to hit any of the standard beats. Only curve and barriers, both colored red, can cause immediate damage. Furthermore, one mistake is admissible (and the beetle’s armor can be earned back) provided you’re able to contend with the visual cacophony that occurs after an error.
Boss fights were an unexpected highlight of Thumper. Each level has around 25 checkpoints, and somewhere between them lays a sentient geometric threat in the distance. Perfection is demanded in many of these sequences, as you won’t be able to hit the final beat and, essentially, fire off a pulsing shot unless you hit all of the previous beats. You don’t zone out with Thumper, you somehow become more in sync with its rhythm and get in the zone, man, and boss fights provide a nice, if not even more challenging, break from obedient droning.
The highlight of Thumper lies with the final bosses that punctuate each level. Each fight is an escalating horror, seemingly taking what was frightening about the previous one and either bolting on scarier shit and/or pushing the threat meter up a few levels. They’re all some sort of ominous disembodied face that looks like its eating the beetle’s highway. Add in a threating protrusion of spikes, pieces of it that appear to be on fire, gaping mouths full of crooked teeth, and eyes that have gone supernova and, yet again, Thumper conjurers a nightmare and makes a reality.
After Thumper stops teaching lessons, it starts to make everything happen faster. This occurs around level 5, when challenges that used to occur a single time start happening in pairs. Shortly before the end of the game, it will repeat these tricks three or four times in a row. In a way, this was disappointing—harder better faster stronger is a safe move—but with such a simple set of rules and a limited number of actions to take, more in line with what your brain can hope to respond to. Thumper thrives on speed, and having too many commands available would make the it more like Simon and less like an instinctive performance (with this in mind, a piece of Thumper’s final level gets creative with its rules. On one hand I would have loved this kind of diversity spread across the full game, but on the other maybe it was only effective because of how hard it went against expectations forged over the previous eight levels).
Your brain is an active participant in your digestion of Thumper. This works in two ways. The first is the ability to hear sounds and recognize patterns—the thump of a beat block, the grinding noise of going against a wall—and subconsciously learn to anticipate the literal road ahead. This happens by default on boss fights that you’re doomed to repeat, but you’re also able to tap into yourself and, perhaps even to your own surprise, know what’s coming before you’ve ever seen it.
The second way to process Thumper comes, from all things, a lesson I learned while autocrossing my car. If you look at the road ahead, rather than the road directly in front of you, your brain will magically fill in the blanks and keep you going in the right direction. Of course, this requires basic proficiency in the craft which, in the case of Thumper, means strict and applied knowledge of its rules, but it’s still kind of a neat hack for playing the game.
This isn’t to imply Thumper is capable of being solved by every player. As of this writing, nearly a week after the game came out, the leaderboard for the final level only has 75 entries (I’m 52!). There’s a distinct difference between playing to survive and playing to win, and I expect many people, especially around level 6 or so, to start bending to the former category. Those achieving or seeking perfection probably have mentat level reflexes or an incredibly refined sense of timing, suggesting some players will get more out of Thumper than the rest of us normal people.
Thumper is also available to play through PlayStation VR. While it’s possible to enjoy Thumper like a regular human being in front of a normal television, both the experience and your own performance are aided by having it centimeters away from your eyeballs. Hearing the beat with good headphones, hovering inches above the beetle on the highway, and pounding out every button in sync with the music was much more of the future bloodsport cyber hacker brain murdering extravaganza that I thinkThumper is trying to evoke.
Drool’s capability to create a horror experience out of something as benign as a rhythm game deserves recognition. Scaring someone 2016—especially in VR—caters toward a disempowered player with a lack of control over their own environment. Outlast, Slender, and Amnesia are great games, but they’ve created a model of horror that seems inescapable. Thumper’s incessant dread and sustained turbulence is achieved naturally through an assault on the senses and the demand for personal action. You have all the power in Thumper, and it’s up to you to use it effectively.
I never thought a rhythm game would be able to step outside its boundaries and look for new places to go. Hotline Miami makes me feel like I haven’t showered in weeks and am experiencing unanticipated fallout of bad drugs. Doom makes me feel wild and capable of running a thousand miles an hour. Superhot makes me feel like a master of time and space. Thumper, while still operating under the rigid disguise of a rhythm game, makes me feel like I’m controlling an assault against an incorporeal and inescapable force—and one that I am ultimately capable of defeating.
