Thumper

Minimalism, maximized.

May 14, 2026

Thumper is an atmospheric rhythm game where you pilot a chrome beetle along an endless track as demons assault your senses.

The early game is pretty slow and generous, but still stark enough to set the mood properly. Every ‘feature’ along the track is presaged by some sound that plays as you watch it get added in front of you – about a second later, its on you. Blue squares on the track itself are beats, and your main scoring metric is tapping the one face button as you cross them to respond to the backing rhythm. Sharp turns glow angry red, unless you hold the face button and turn into them to grind your way around safely.

Each chapter, more elements get added for you to either dodge or smash through – bars that cross the track will smash if you’re holding the grind button, rings floating around the track that you can launch off a beat square to soar through, the track expanding into multiple lanes, then releasing serpents along them to force you to weave your way through. Everything you hit properly will add to your score, and every turn you fumble or bar you crash into without grinding will strip your shell off, then kill you on a second mistake, sending you back to the start of the current stage.

At certain midpoints and at the end of each chapter, you’ll face off against a boss, and these consist of shorter, repeating bits of track, with beat squares in green that you have to hit all of to unlock the final ‘attack’ beat, dealing a bit of damage and moving on. Miss a square, and you have to survive until the start loops back around and you can try again.

At a glance, especially in stills or short gifs, Thumper might look like Audiosurf or Rez, and you could go into it expecting a moody cruise, a mildly trippy ride, a turn on, drop in, tune out experience. Thumper is not having that shit. Where Rez is the kind of abstract spectacle that makes people pretend they have synesthesia and quip about ‘what kind of drugs were these devs on? Ha ha~’ Thumper is an actual nightmarish acid trip. And that experience only gets more intense if, like me, you decide to play the game [nearly] entirely in VR.

In a headset, in near total sensory isolation, Thumper is a psychic attack you inflict on yourself. Your fragile mortal shell screams down the track, turns and bars and hissing vipers hurtle toward you, the almost painful soundtrack needling you as you fight to keep up, an occasional inhuman shriek punctuating the ordeal. After playing the first two chapters, I took my headset off thinking ‘this is pretty neat, I hope it holds up.’ The next night, after finishing the third chapter, I peeled myself out of virtual reality with trembling hands and just stared at a blank wall for a minute. After the fourth and fifth chapters I really wasn’t sure I could finish all nine.

Thankfully, the difficulty curve, while steep, mostly plateaus at about that level, right on the cusp of what I found myself… not comfortable with, but just agonizingly short of conquering in one or two attempts. Also nice is that Thumper is surprisingly generous with checkpoints – every chapter is broken up into 20-30 stages, and death or manual restart just takes you back to the start of the current stage, and you can dive right back in without a lot of wasted time spent stewing on mistakes. A few of the stages are kind of long, but just as many are actually very short, and most fall into the ‘couple of minutes’ sweet spot. Getting through a full chapter, then, is a grueling feat of endurance, but it never ends up being frustrating or tedious enough to warrant a rage-quit.

Your one bit of armor gets restored if you make it to the end of a stage and hit the final beat, but you can also recover it mid-stage by using one beat to jump up and slam down on the next beat… although I think you have to be keeping a solid combo going for it to work, because sometimes I’d be desperately pounding those squares several times before the sparkly health-recovery one would finally appear. In fact, I probably got myself into trouble in later stages trying too hard to force a repair when I should’ve just gotten to the end of the level in Sir Arthur’s boxers, so to speak.

Later stages ramp up the speed and complexity, and add more elements, but the game does a good job showing you the ropes without relying on words at all. Some nuances of the mechanics, like the healing opportunities I described before, are totally unexplained, and left to the player to discover. Probably the most important example, especially for people who want to shoot for high scores, is the fact that sometimes rings appear after a turn, which normally forces you back to the ground if you’re airborne. It turns out that, if you can manage a perfect turn, leaning into the curve right as you hit the curb, while airborne, you actually maintain your flight until the next turn, and can chain perfect turns to stay in the air almost indefinitely.

Unfortunately, this is where control issues start to rear their heads. Since I was playing mostly through the VR mode, I was restricted to using my Quest 3 controllers, and specifically, using a teeny tiny thumbstick as my only directional input. For most of the game, it was fine, but any time I needed to stick multiple rapid-fire turns or swoop up and slam down real quickly, it was unreliable and pretty damn uncomfortable. I played one level on a flatscreen with a controller, and while there was some loss of immersion and intensity, just having a D-pad made the zig-zags and four lane highway weaving sequences a lot easier.1 Also, as is usual with a game that only has one face-button input, my right thumb was pretty much locked in position, hammering that one button, on one spot of my thumb, dozens of times per stage, and it got pretty fucking sore. I’ll survive, but there was at least one day where I woke up and was like ‘I don’t think I can play Thumper today’ and not just due to residual psychic trauma.

The audio design is where Thumper really wrings it out of you, though. Taking any snippet or clip in isolation probably gives a weird impression of random bangs and screeches in no identifiable pattern, but as you’re playing, especially if you sit down to do an entire chapter in one sitting, it actually comes together pretty convincingly. You’ll pick up on certain chains, chords, sequences, almost full motifs getting repeated, start to anticipate the rhythm more than merely reacting to the preview stimuli, [which gets too cluttered and oversaturated to rely on eventually] and start to feel the music, such as it is. It’s still aggressive, menacing, and discordant, but the more you play the game the more you’ll sync to it in spite of yourself. I think the most common interpretation of Thumper’s story is as an ascent from Hell or a trip through the afterlife, but my impression was more like being abducted and forced to learn to play an alien musical instrument before getting unceremoniously dumped back on Earth.

The game keeps leaderboards, where you can check your performance both against the best in the world and whatever Steam friends you have that have also played each chapter. You also get a rank for each stage, and that gets averaged into an overall rank for that chapter, from C up through S. Unfortunately, the game’s scoring system is kind of wack, and, especially in the later stages, a little too perfection-heavy to make me want to bother pursuing full S-ranks, or, hell, anything higher than the 2.1 GPA I managed to drag myself over the finish line with. The problem is there’s not really any distinction between C-rank and B or A – if you completely ignore every beat you can, just hold that grind button down the entire time and focus on surviving every turn, sure, your score will suck and you won’t get those satisfying bongs and blasts, but you’ll clear the stage pretty easily. If you actually try, and get anything less than 100% beat hits, you’ll probably get a B or A. Probably. Sometimes I felt like I did alright and still got a C. Fine. But finishing a chapter with any of your stage rankings lower than an S apparently locks your total to an A. And there’s no reward for getting an overall A. I mean, there’s no reward for an S rank either other than satisfaction and an achievement, but that’s still two things an A rank don’t do for you.

That means that, outside of showing that you’re slightly better than your friends at replaying a rhythm game, the only ‘goal’ beyond rolling credits is to shoot for a full flush of S-ranks, and, frankly, that seems even more nightmarish than having sleep paralysis and being forced to mentally play Thumper to escape would be. Well, what if you want to go further, and chase the top of the leaderboard? Well, then not only do you have to hit every single beat, you also have to scrape up minor score bonuses from every possible perfect turn, smash through every possible bar, capture every possible ring, hell, I don’t know what other obscure optional actions you can do to earn a petty pile of points, but you’d have to do them all, and some of them are kind of obnoxious. I saw score guides recommending that you intentionally steer INTO every track ending in the multi-track sections, because you can technically get a perfect turn bonus for banking off of them at exactly the right time, rather than simply moving to an open track. No thanks.

But my biggest problem with the game is the final boss – not the ‘final boss’ of chapter 9, but the encounter that comes after it, as the ultimate test of your finesse, right before the credits. It’s bullshit. The gimmick is that the track speed is constantly rubber banding back and forth, getting dragged out into slo-mo and then slammed forward at warp speed, totally arbitrary and truly obnoxious. There’s nothing going on with the boss that would be novel or difficult if the random speed changes didn’t rip the rug out from under you, and that gimmick is not interesting. It’s fucking annoying. It’s hard to even describe how frustrating it is. It’s like if a game’s final stage just had a fire alarm going off over top of it. Should the final challenge of a game be playing it while someone shakes your shoulders? What if the last boss of Sekiro kicked the player in the shins the entire time you fought him?2 It is the only thing in the game that made me want to rage quit and go watch the ending on YouTube, and I’m only glad I stuck it out because the ending isn’t that spectacular anyway and it would’ve just pissed me off more.

There is one last feature for you if you beat the game and still want a little more – every chapter has a + variant that unlocks after you beat it. + mode gives you a shiny golden beetle skin, and makes recovering your shell if you ever lose it… not impossible, but certainly significantly tougher. I think you have to ground pound onto a shiny ‘empowered’ beat square instead of just tapping it, which is an opportunity you don’t always get and seems to be hard to engineer manually. And dying restarts the entire chapter. I beat the first couple stages in + mode, and even got full S ranks, but there’s no way in hell I’m ever going past stage 3+. None of the people on my friends list even played the base game past like stage 5 so there’s no one to make fun of anyway.

Terrible final boss aside, Thumper really is a cool experience, and one I’m glad I finally sat down for. If you have the opportunity to try it in VR, even with the mild control problems, I think that’s absolutely the way to go – the isolation and intensity is like nothing else I’ve played. Just don’t come looking for a relaxing rhythm session, a satisfying score chase, or anything identifiable as human music.

Thumper can be purchased on Steam, Playstation 4, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch.

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