Thumper drawing1/8/2024 ![]() It is a cardinal sin of rhythm-games to ever change the tempo Thumper only slows down for a split-second when you smash into something, but it was enough to throw me. If I lost one life, I’d often lose the other within five seconds. Speaking of errors, the cacophony of alarming visual and audio feedback when you slam into a wall totally breaks my concentration, and even obscures the screen sometimes. Sometimes, though, it will enclose you in a corridor with sharp turns that prevent you from seeing what’s coming up, meaning you have to memorise the pattern of obstacles through trial and error. It’s extremely fast, but usually you can see far enough down the rail to be able to react quickly enough to survive. There are a couple of things about Thumper that annoy the rhythm-action purist in me. It reminds me of Devil Daggers, both in the simplicity of its play and the arresting visual style. The palette is dominated by red and black. Bosses loom menacingly on the horizon as your chrome beetle speeds down its endless rail, taking the form of fiery skulls or abstract, geometric entities with mouths. The visuals are hellish, sharp, with tendrils and right-angles and weird undulating shapes that recall insectoid limbs. The colours-blues, whites, greens-are comforting and chill. Their visuals are all expanding and contracting shapes, blooming colours, pretty lights-echoes of the kind of blissy visuals that your brain comes up with on its own when you close your eyes and relax. ![]() Most iconic rhythm games (Rez, Amplitude) try to lull you into a sense of flow. What’s so interesting about Thumper is the atmosphere of doom and malevolence it conjures. ![]() Suddenly you’re battling your nerves alongside everything else that Thumper throws into your path. Thumper stops short of true sadism by giving you two shots at success but good lord, the feeling when you’re on that last try and you’re about to come up on a new section of track is not pleasant. Lose concentration for a half-second and careen into one of the obstacles on the track, and your beetle’s chrome wings will be stripped violently from its body, leaving you with one last chance before death. Thumper’s nine long, relentless levels are split into short checkpointed sections. There are ways to wring a higher score out of each section with perfect timing, but first time through, your only concern will be survival. Fail to turn, jump, change rails or smash through barriers in time with the grim industrial soundtrack and death is immediate. Thumper is a rhythm game with deceptively simple one-button controls, but one in which the slightest lapse will finish you immediately.
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