Frightening, immediate and exhilarating, Thumper does well to immediately set itself apart as a rhythm game. You play the titular character, a chrome-silver beetle, hurtling down an on-rails psychedelic landscape, thumping your way through nightmarish stages, accompanied by a pulse-pounding industrial soundtrack that complements and assists your progress.

Its breathtaking pace, too, is noticeable even in the tutorial stages, when you’re first taught to “thump,” the blue blinking on-screen prompts flitting past in a flash, demanding a simple button input as you pass over, releasing a dazzling shockwave of light and bass. Soon, the game has you clanging around turns, crashing through barriers and zipping through score-multiplying rings – faster than you may ever have thought yourself capable of – with each gameplay action having a corresponding audio/visual reaction that add layers to both its wonderful techno-horror aesthetic and the forceful, percussive tracks that populate its levels.

Aesthetics of violence.

Especially striking in its opening moments is Thumper’s sumptuously singular aesthetic. Careening through its nine expansive levels – the interface looking like a luge race on bad acid – you’re met with countless feasts for the senses, from laser-spewing zombified voodoo masks to geometric chasms that envelop you in a trippy air of claustrophobia.

The game is completely VR compatible too, whether on PC or PS4. Headphones are one thing, but if you’re already equipped, it’s highly recommended; to have Thumper’s monolithic bosses towering over you and its synesthetic obstacles exploding and flitting past with full-immersion gear can only enhance your experience with such a sensory spectacular.

The levels themselves contain a wealth of obstacles that are all clearly defined with a distinct neon glow and accompanying sound cues, vital to precision-based input needed when such obstacles fly by so quickly. When you jump up to hit a glowing blue ring or prepare for a harsh turn, the respective collision comes alive with its own satisfyingly distinct sound effect, complementing the track of the level you’re playing.

There can be the odd moment here and there when Thumper’s visuals become a notch too hyperactive. For instance, when you miss a cue and take damage, a loud pulse of red flashes across the screen, occasionally making it quite difficult to re-acclimatise to the level’s pace before getting hit by another obstacle. But given the pace and replayability of Thumper’s rhythm-centric gameplay, your ability to overcome obstacles with ease will also depend on ol’ fashioned practice.

Thumper’s fair game.

Thumper’s control scheme is deceptively simple in that it’s a two-button system; everything centres around the thumb stick and the X/A button. Slowly, the game introduces you to the obstacles you’ll be facing. To crash through a barrier, simply hold X. To turn a corner; X and the direction you want. To jump; X and up. It even sounds simple when you spell it out, but Thumper is quick to ramp up the challenge: Increasingly fast-paced and complex tracks demand tighter inputs, later levels bear longer stretches without checkpoints, a pesky recurring enemy appears in small sections to punish you for missing obstacles, and you’re eased into the game introducing multiple lanes, with accompanying obstacles – such as a fleet of torpedoes forcing you to hop from one lane to the next.

The basics are fairly well covered in the first 15 minutes should you be so inclined: