I love rhythm games. The combination of music and gameplay that comes together with precise timing and satisfying crispy button presses is always great fun. It can make your adrenaline rise like nothing else, make yourself dissolve into music, thinking only about keeping and following the rhythm. And once you succeed at a very hard level, you can relax and marvel how you even made it through that onslaught of notes.

Quite a few games have accompanied me in the past, some even right into the present, Donkey Konga (with bongo controllers!), Elite Beat Agents (basically Proto-Osu!), Love Live School Idol Festival (my first entry point into the Love Live franchise, don’t look at me like that), Final Fantasy Theatrhythm (Why is “One-Winged Angel” DLC?), and Audiosurf 1 & 2 (which let you play your own music!). It is a little dream of mine to own a Dance Dance Revolution arcade machine one day, as I ever saw them in films and my country doesn’t have arcades – and people who know me in real life know that I will immediately play it if I encounter one. I’m not super good at DDR, but, goddamn, do I love it.

Once I saw the trailer for this specific game here last year ago, I was interested. It looked sort of like Audiosurf, but more intense, far more intense. However, it just trickled to the back of my mind to stay there, not a huge wish to immediately pick it up, but maybe I would give it a shot one day. And as one Steam sale rolled around, I finally bought it for myself.

It was a trip I had never experienced before.

The game was called Thumper. You are a little metallic space beetle, rushing along a single path in an unknown galaxy. Little spots of light are on your track, you press a button to hit them with a shockwave. Some metallic barriers will spring up in curves, so you need to lean in with the control stick to not frontally hit them. And sometimes, laser barriers will get into your path that you must speed through while holding the same button. Essentially, all you need it a control stick and a button. These obstacles follow the same rhythm as the music, no problem. It’s one big track separated into little segments, you can even quit midway through a song and return at a later time. As simple as that.

Or so one might think.

This world is visceral, dark, haunting and fast. Two hits and you’re dead. When you hit a curve barrier or a laser, your metal wings get blown off, leaving you only with your riffled little beetle body whizzing along a nightmarish highway through space. Of course, you get your wings back if you finish a section of a level, but it puts pressure on you. You want to protect yourself and your beetle. What your beetle does or what they feel, but the goal is clear: forward. The only way is forward for you and your space beetle.

And the most driving factor of your quest forward is the music. Although, can it be described as music? I had extraordinary fun with Donkey Konga and Elite Beat Agents, as they feature songs from Earth, Wind and Fire, Queen and even Smash Mouth, all songs you recognise and can sing along to to your heart’s content. They make you tap your foot and bop your head to the music, and they will be earworms for the rest of the day!

Not so in Thumper. You cannot sing to Thumper.

The music is a beat, from ‘calm and eerie’ to ‘loud and clanging’, and you are building on the beat by interacting with the obstacles that come at you: barriers make a “clank” sound and “swoosh” past you as you lean so far into the curve that the rear end of your beetle touches the wall for a second, the spots of light go “booom” as you give them a shockwave, and the laser barriers break with high “click click” sounds. To that, once you notice that you can spread your wings to fly, a risky but rewarding move, you can add “ding ding dings” as your metal wings break little light arcs above the track. And once you manage to successfully fly and land from soundwave to soundwave spot, you smash downwards with a satisfying “FOOOOMF” that even makes your screen go into slow-motion for a second.

To all of this rhythmic noise in time signatures foreign to untrained ears comes the background – a deep, heavy sound carpet that spreads all over, a dissonant and intimidating soundscape that does more than just to amplify the empty space you fly in. You notice it, this is more than just a long metal highway through the galaxy, it is something else. And as the track suddenly grows insect-like legs and narrow geometric tunnels that close in on you, the doom orchestra in the background doesn’t stop with its loud drums and haunting strings, all it does is pushing you forward, forward, forward – towards what? What is the goal? What is the purpose? The bosses are too big to understand, too strange to grasp, fighting in ways you need to analyse to survive, twisting, disrupting, blocking your path, that never ending path hurtling towards them. You need to follow the beat to continue. The droning beat dictating your heart.

To make a long story short: Thumper is a lovecraftian rhythm horror game.

“Horror” not the sense of spooky imagery or jumpscares, “horror” in the sense of existential dread and the fear of not knowing what will come next. New types of enemies may appear, the music might change, or tunnels might block your view, pushing the reaction time further down. All with that fast and immense pressure of timing, understanding and reading in a matter of seconds. The visuals in combination with the music alone are haunting, putting you in a state of alertness, but what is the true kicker is the gameplay, which merges perfectly with the rest – creating one cohesive dark beauty.

This game is difficult. The learning curve is steep, but it remains always 100% fair. If you died, it was absolutely your own fault for not reacting in time. Every obstacle is clearly telegraphed, not only with a distinguishable colour and look (sound spots are blue, barriers are red-silver and appear vertically, lasers are red-only and appear horizontally) but also with a sound. Barriers come up with a big “clack“, lasers shoot in from the side with a “clink” and enemies slither in with a “shhhhh” or intimidate you with a loud “BWAAM“. Combining with all of these sound words I already described earlier: That’s a lot of noise. Noise that becomes music. Noise that is useful.

I have talked a lot about this game now, and haven’t actually shown you any gameplay footage yet. Take a look at the trailer:

It’s an onslaught of information, strange imagery and rhythmic loudness that wants your full concentration and focus. Game marketing loves to talk about “immersive gameplay”, but I have rarely seen it more fitting here. The game draws you in with its carpet of noise, the ungraspable atmosphere and quick, unforgiving, but fair judgement of your skills. As I said, the game is fair, the learning curve is steep, but it never feels disheartening. This game pushes you to go forward, forward, forward – the same way your little beetle goes forward, forward, forward. And the only way to do that is to simply ‘git gud’.

I only played it with headphones, which I highly recommend, and there is a VR version available as well. From what I’ve seen in other reviews, this version is even far more intense, and my head-phones-only adventure already was. You will be frustrated, you will put the controller down, only to return after 2 minutes, as the noise and the lights draw you inside again. You will scream, yell, be relieved, celebrate and curse a lot, and that’s beautiful.

Conclusion

Thumper is an intense game that I would recommend to everyone who loves fast and furious precise gameplay with strong immersion. It’s “short”, with only 9 levels, but you will have to bite and fight yourself through those, so I was entertained for a few weeks. Post-game contents include world-wide leaderboards, highscores and rankings, and you will love to return to it and be astonished at how fast your accumulated skill crumbles apart again.

The “story” is simple, if there even is any, and yet it managed to surprise me in the end with one of the most memorable and gameplay-bending end bosses. Any game that can make me have my jaw fall to the ground in surprise and dread is a great one, and Thumper managed it several times.

If you like rhythm games, this one is a must-play for you, for everyone else, this is a trip you should not miss out on. Dive into the lovecraftian world of noise and loudness, and fight your way forward and ever forward.

To infinity and beyond.

The End.