now playing — thumper
played on playstation 5
I have no earthly idea what caused me to want to go back to Thumper, years after its initial release in the heady days of the original PSVR, but I did. I think it was coaxed out by a family get-together where someone insisted on me setting up BeatSaber, and I had to go through my list of old VR titles, and remembered, “Oh yeah I never did finish this”.
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Thumper is like the dark love child of Burnout, and Guitar Hero — you play as a chrome beetle on a track, speeding along at hundreds of miles an hour dodging obstacles and hitting notes. This is accompanied by a thrashing, industrial score, that covers every conceivable time signature and wicked beat pattern. It is intense, bleak, and smooth to control. Thumper is also a very difficult game by the back half, where I had to give up on going for S-ranking all the levels, and settle for merely finishing them and barely scraping by.
It is a simple game, but paradoxically one that is hard to describe the appeal of without putting someone in the headset and giving them the controller, and then it instantly makes sense and clicks. The strongest aspect of Thumper is the dark, sleek, futuristic vibe that it creates through inky visuals and an art style reminiscent of retro films like “Mandy”. There is nothing else that looks quite like Thumper, and in VR it’s a stunner.
If I had a criticism, I think it would be that sometimes the game is a little tough to read on a flat-screen, which is how I played it. Corners and obstacles have an annoying way of sneaking up on you, when you don’t have your face pressed up directly to the glass like you do in a VR headset, and the depth effect is obviously not present. It’s still very playable, but the difficulty is certainly up a couple of notches when playing on a traditional display.
Another criticism, although minor, is that the game does run out of totally new mechanics to throw at you by about the halfway point. Things do get faster, and the twists in the road get a little more tricky to circumnavigate, but it does not evolve meaningfully.
All that is very forgivable in light of Thumper’s total uniqueness and excellent, sharp aesthetic — it is quite easily one of my top 5 favorite VR titles.
