Note: For the sake of simplicity, this article refers to only the Xbox controls for the game.

Thumper is what you'd expect to happen if you shut an indie music festival organiser and the bass guitarist of an avant-garde metal band in a room together, and that's almost exactly how the "rhythm violence" title was forged. Development studio Drool comprises of ex-Harmonix programmer and general music scene coordinator Marc Flury, and ex-Harmonix artist and member of the Rhode Island band "Lightning Bolt" Brian Gibson. In Thumper you head down a long highway of obstacles and must press A and sometimes a directional button at each of these gates to slide past unscathed. Thumper simultaneously defines itself by its proximity to the rest of the rhythm game biome and by having one foot outside of reality altogether. It's paradoxically a very weird piece of media and yet not that atypical for the genre.

Rhythm games are not just games in which we're matching inputs to musical patterns; they follow another rule. Playing a rhythm game almost always requires entering a series of pre-scripted inputs within short pre-scripted time windows. These inputs are all explicitly prompted by the game and all identical each time. No matter how many times you play the bass for Gimme Shelter on Rock Band, it will always start with a red note, then a yellow note, then an orange note. It will always run at 119 BPM whether this is your first or your fiftieth time playing it. This distinguishes rhythm games from other kinds of games where, even if the palette of player actions is small or maps are claustrophobic, a variety of inputs can be used by the player to reach their goals.

The closest thing to rhythm games' style of gameplay elsewhere in the medium of video games is in quick-time events which are also series of button prompts delivered within specific time windows so we might think about rhythm games as long, musical QTEs. I don't say that to take away from the genre, but if you've ever been frustrated with QTEs in games for being too shallow and lifeless, you might see rhythm games as QTEs fixed. Inputs are made more challenging, usually feel more like the in-world actions they correspond to, and receive musical backing in a way that makes them so much more than just video game connective tissue. Thumper is a naked example of the QTE format that's embedded in rhythm games because it strips the gameplay of the genre down to its bare minimum. While Thumper might feel alien to us, its foreign elements are in its presentation rather than its gameplay. Just as we might break a DDR level down into an up prompt, then a right prompt, then an up prompt, a level in Thumper might require you to hit A, then hit A and left, and then hit A and up. The scripted note highway is as much a part of Thumper as it most other rhythm games. So where does Thumper deviate?

One thing you'll notice is that other rhythm games don't prioritise grounding you in a space, but Thumper does. Non-rhythm games typically have gameplay work through some combination of interaction with the GUI and a virtual environment. Note highway games and many other types of rhythm games, however, are played entirely in a GUI with the environment being purely cosmetic. DDR has an arrow screen imposed over a scene of someone dancing; Guitar Hero has the fretboard interface plastered over an animation of a stage performance, and so on. Unsurprisingly, this leads to games where you feel like you're observing a universe instead of occupying it. Thumper, on the other hand, takes the traditional action game route of making the environment itself a visual interface. To explore how it does this, we need to look at how games cue player actions.

We can imagine a game with abstract visual prompts spread out across the environment, imploring the player to "Hold B" in select spots to open a door or "Press RT" in the direction of targets, but this is a dry and inelegant way to have a player interface with the world. In games, characters and features in the world act as implicit prompts. A switch on a wall may become an implicit prompt to press B so that you can open a door with it; an enemy becomes an implicit prompt to press RT and aim in their direction so that you can shoot them, and so on.

Rhythm games don't use this communication method because they're not about translating the inputs on a controller into actions in an environment. Instead, the inputs themselves are the focus of gameplay, often because controllers are designed so that input itself emulates the relevant activity. Thumper presents itself through the concrete environmental gameplay you'd find in a traditional game rather than the abstract prompts that the rhythm genre has used. Instead of having a Left + A prompt slide up the screen, it would use a wall on our right to prompt us to hit Left and A. Instead of having an Up + A prompt hit the end of the note highway, it tells us we need to perform this manoeuvre by having a bed of spikes on the track in front of us. This is how we get from the track coming towards us, which is the convention of many modern rhythm games, to Thumper's configuration of us moving along the track. Thumper removes any visual interface which may distract from the setting and grounds itself in a tangible place, even if only just.

Thumper's environments use a mix of hard materials like the metal walls and ground, with the intangible like the exploding light effects or the nebulous colour which makes up most of the game's skybox. The surrealism of Thumper might make it appear outright abstract if it weren't for grounding touches like a boss that's a humanoid head or walls with light strips across them. Thumper is existentially terrifying in that you know you're somewhere but it's unclear what you're looking at and in that this setting seems to be completely alien and inhospitable. You have no context for who you are, your location, or what you're doing, and little of Thumper's world resembles anything in our world. There's nothing here which looks like it's meant to accommodate human existence, there's only one long, thin ribbon stretching through the void. Sometimes slamming down on a light panel will be credited by the game as a "kill" with a distant scream sounding and tentacles disappearing from the level, but otherwise, no explanation of what we've killed. The twitching appendages around the edge of the track embody both the organic and architectural, while a blurring at the edges of the screen makes it feel like someone has drugged us. The music of the game is expressive of the same nightmarish qualities.

In games like Rock Band or Guitar Hero, the venues are just venues; they usually don't evoke anything specific about the mood of the music played in them. However, Thumper matches a callous, unreal world with a highly experimental and aggressive sound. The soundtrack sometimes uses analogues for horns and war drums, the instruments that we associate with coming doom, like it's playing a chorus for our inevitable destruction at the hands of its demanding gameplay. During some intervals, the music has a lot in common with ambient drone, while the sound that underscores gameplay has this furious percussion, and whatever mode Thumper is in, it becomes this dense wall of noise. The blunt, violent sound effects become inseparable from the music to the point that Drool included some of them in the retail release of the OST. The audio, gameplay, and visuals come together to make it feel like you hit obstacles in the environment savagely hard. This is how the game earns its "rhythm violence" badge, despite not containing any blood or combat to speak of. It knows that the outline of violence is not just in people hurting each other, but in the fast and forceful collision of objects. The game is such a deafening cacophony of noise and crashes that it tests the limits for what our brains can process at any one time.

While many games are punishing towards the player or require us to put in serious effort to progress, almost all games still want to suck us in and keep us in the hypnosis of play. The dream for most game companies is creating something that people will stay glued to for hours on end. Thumper, however, is impossible to play for any extended period. The game explodes out of the screen at us and is so stimulating that any prolonged exposure leads to overstimulation. That makes Thumper feel like this hazardous material; it's a game that leaves you happily winded after interaction with it. When you're immersed in the game, time slows down and what feels like fifteen minutes is closer to five. This is both because the experience packs so much sound and light into such small periods of time and because you have to demonstrate split-second reactions not to be dashed into tiny, metallic pieces.

Thumper is heavily reaction-based, and that tells you something about how it relates its contents to each other. As a rule, the music in rhythm games acts as a guide to tell us when to hit what buttons; that's possible because the notes in the music stand out and there's a reliable sense of rhythm. It also helps that many of the tracks in music games are well-known and memorable. Thumper goes against the grain. Its music is all original so you can't know it beforehand, it's not memorable, and in this tortured roar it's hard to pick out a melody you can translate into gameplay cues. The soundtrack seems to pound on the drums as enthusiastically as it does because it's the only thing that maintains a beat in this haze of sound, but by itself, it's not enough to telegraph when you should hit your targets, and it can still get lost in the mix. Trying to match your actions to the rhythm of the song is difficult even when there is an apparent pace because a lot of the beats don't have an obstacle to accompany them and it's easy to lose the rhythm if you're not hitting every single obstacle. Not to mention, some of the hazards seem to arrive slightly off-beat.

There's also no relation between the kind of action you're performing in the game and what the music is doing beyond its beat. If you're playing the keyboard in Rock Band 3 and the notes on the song begin getting higher, you know you're going to have to move up the keyboard. If you're playing DrumMania and you know there's a kick drum coming up in the song then you know you're going to have to hit the kick pedal. Thumper doesn't translate anything about its music (again, outside of rhythm) into components of its note highway. Even if you know the way the noise is about to twist, that doesn't tell you more about whether it's a left wall or a right wall about to come down the track. All these factors combined mean that you're better off just using your sight and ignoring what you hear when acting. At least, for most of the game. There are a few isolated sections where you can get a better sense of rhythm and obstacles working together, even if you still don't feel a particularly strong sync between changes in sound and changes in input.

This doesn't, however, mean that the individual obstacles in Thumper don't have a relationship with something larger than themselves. The game often plays the level features off of each other in interesting ways. For example, plenty of levels have these alternating slaloms of walls on your left and walls on your right, and it feels good to whip back and forth between them. When the game gives you a series of obstacles you must be airborne to hit, it often places a light panel on the other side of them, allowing you to leap up into the air and then smash down on the other side, releasing a burst of light as you do. The game has a preference for certain sequences of hazards, and in some cases, these sequences are copy-pasted across levels so you can practise passing them and the designer can routinely test you on your ability to do so. There's a great example here of how the most lasting way to teach someone to carry out a task isn't just showing them how to do it once, but showing them, giving them enough time to forget the techniques, and then bringing that task back to remind them. Drool know that doing this enough times ensures you memorise these sequences.

In its totality, Thumper is a game that keeps the scripted input of the rhythm genre intact but is neither concerned with the emulation of real-world musical activities that games like Just Dance or Rocksmith are, nor is it concerned with setting music to micro-narratives in the way that games like Rhythm Heaven or Elite Beat Agents are. Instead, Thumper is about using visuals, audio, and gameplay to create palpable physicality and uses these three characteristics in a way that is more emotionally cohesive than most rhythm games, even if events in the soundtrack don't line up one-to-one with events in the gameplay. The feelings that Thumper manifests are those of being on the outskirts of reality and of being in a place that you are not meant to survive in or maybe even comprehend, but where by sheer force of will, you do anyway. Thanks for reading.