The Therapist Gamer

I played the demo of Thumper on PlayStation VR and thought it was pretty awesome.  The developers call it a "rhythm violence" game, which basically means it's a rhythm game with intense music.  You play as a shiny beetle going down a track and you need to press buttons at the right time in order to stay alive.  It's pretty much a standard rhythm/music game.  As in most of these games the music track is synced to the button presses.  Each stage has about two dozen sections, with each section basically acting as a checkpoint; every stage has two or three boss fights which differentiate themselves from the rest of the level by not allowing any mistakes whatsoever.

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In most (if not all) rhythm games your button presses are synced to the beat, the melody, or some other part of the song.  This simply wasn't the case with most of the levels of Thumper - there was dramatic percussion music and occasionally the button prompts lined up with it, but often you're asked to perform a series of button presses that have no discernible relation to the track that's playing.  It's weird.  I don't know why they didn't sync up the music to the gameplay since it's pretty much a required dynamic of the rhythm genre.

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The levels in Thumper are pretty long - I'd say most levels are about 30 minutes, which is pretty intense for a rhythm game.  There are nine levels in total.  The first level does a great job of easing you into the core game mechanics - such as barging through obstacles and going around corners.  But the difficulty ramps up pretty quickly.  Now, I'm not normally a big fan of rhythm games and don't have much experience with them, but I think Thumper gets way too hard way too quickly.  This is my main complaint about the game: the music is good, the graphics are interesting, the gameplay is fluid, but it's too frickin' hard!  Seriously, I simply cannot get past even half of level 5.  It took me hours to complete level 4.  I can't think of the last time I simply couldn't beat a video game because it was too difficult - it's probably been since the NES days.  There have been optional tasks in games that have been too difficult for me (Vanquish challenge stages!), but I can always complete the main game . . . until now.  I think if I put hours and hours of effort into the game to get better I could probably do it, but right now I'm just not even close.  And since I'm only halfway through the easiest part of the game I don't think I have a chance.

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I don't necessarily think that a game being difficult should count against it - in fact, one of my favorite games ever is the notoriously difficult Demon's Souls.  I just think there are some things the developer could have done to accommodate people like me.  For example, they could have been more forgiving about being able to miss button prompts - maybe certain things could damage you every time but most things won't (later stages introduce a huge ring that zaps you if you miss anything).  Or maybe there could've been multiple difficulty levels where the easier settings have either fewer obstacles or are more forgiving of mistakes.  One major issue is that it's simply too difficult to see certain gameplay objects - for example, there are sections where there are multiple tracks with death-inducing walls at the end of some of the tracks, but it's just too difficult to see what's coming up.  And I sat like 6 feet from a 60 inch TV!  Even though Demon's Souls is difficult you can at least get hit more than twice, and if you get stuck you can try another area or level up.  On the bright side, if you're really into challenging yourself then Thumper should be right up your alley!

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I feel like I'm being a bit hard on Thumper because there's a lot about the game that is executed well.  I suppose I'm just disappointed because the first level is great and the rest of the game struggles to live up to it.

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Edit (May 2017): Okay, well, I somehow managed to beat the game.  I stand by everything I said - the game is simply too difficult.  The two main issues are 1) poor visibility, and 2) that ring that kills you automatically if you miss a beat.  And it just gets worse.  The game designers went out of their way to make the track and obstacles difficult to see, and that deadly ring is put in the most outrageous of places.  I take particular issue with it being used on bosses.

 

So, if you miss a single prompt on a boss then you have to finish the "cycle" and start again, this time without making errors.  The boss sections are particularly demanding and it'll probably take most people several tries at each section before they can get past it and move onto the next part of the boss battle - failure is part of learning.  Each boss has four sections and if you die at any point then you'll need to start over on the first one.  As time goes on you'll start to master the first section but the second section will start to give you trouble - it all takes lots of learning.  So those frickin' game developers make this whole process a hundred times more arduous by adding the deadly ring to the boss fights!  In other words, at a section in the game where you need dozens of attempts to master what's required they add something that kills you if you mess up.  That's like making so that you only have one life but infinite continues - it's just a waste of time!  Just give me infinite lives!  It's extremely difficult to learn the required music patterns when every ten seconds the track freezes (so the ring can kill you) and you have to start over.  It's simply bad game design.

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I have to give them props for the final boss.  I don't want to spoil it but it presents a very clever twist to the game.  However, it's also possibly the most frustrating thing they could have done.  The final boss magnifies the worst parts of Thumper and essentially turns the game into Dragon's Lair.  What I mean is that there's literally no way of knowing what's coming up and you just have to die countless times until you learn the specific pattern it wants you to learn.  C'mon.  That's not fun.  That's 1980s-quarter-eating-arcade-bullcrap.

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And before you call me a massive baby I just want to point out that, according to the PSN trophy list, only 5% of players have completed the game and only 16% have completed level 5 - which is where I was first stuck.  Thumper has a lot going for it and it's a great idea for a game but unfortunately it has some serious, serious flaws.