The Patreon Letters - 09/09/17 (Patreon)

This week, M and I got Nintendo Switches, not because we want to play the Hot New Releases (although we do want to play Mario), but because we’re beings of comfort and if we can play a videogame in bed, we will play that videogame in bed. We play a lot of small games and a lot of japanese games. It’s a console made for us. Apart from the fact that in the UK, the games for it cost sixty fucking pounds, which is an illegal amount of money and the head of Nintendo of Europe should be arrested and jailed immediately.

Anyway, as part of my switchening I picked up Thumper, a game I played on PC last year and not coincidentally the best game released in 2017, if not this decade, if not ever. It’s also a game made for me, me alone, and nobody else on earth. I’ve been playing it through again and having just the best time with it. It’s not a game for everyone, so I wanted to write up just why I think it is as amazing as I do.

Thumper is what you get when you cross Burnout Paradise (which is a perfect videogame) with the feeling of being the drummer at your shitty band’s first gig, there’s not that many people but there’s also way too many fucking people and you’re fairly sure you’ve forgotten everything after the second song. Every level is a twenty minute long anxiety attack and, also, the best thing you have ever done. I love it with every fibre of my being. I probably wouldn’t recommend it to anybody.

That's because it's basically impossible if you’re not already drummer or otherwise innately familiar with being in the rhythm section. One of the two people who made the game is the bassist in a noise rock duo and it shows. In any sense of traditional game design, where a game introduces concepts, teaches them to you, and then allows you to master them, Thumper is an abject failure. You can bash your head against it, learning its mechanics and getting through the levels in a not-crazy amount of time, but I don’t think it would be much fun.

The game has the tagline “rhythm violence,” which is a fantastic way to communicate what the game is to someone who hasn’t played it, but a really terrible way to communicate how the game feels once you get over the hump. At its best, it isn’t an antagonistic game, it’s not a game that you win, as if in a fight. I like the comparison to Burnout Paradise, because the core appeal is identical. Just as it feels good to drive fast, drifting in and out of traffic, so too does it feel good to speed through Thumper’s twists and turns, ricocheting off the walls with rhythmic precision. The weakest element of Thumper is its needless scoring system, Thumper is a game of the moment, a game about grabbing onto a feeling and never letting go, in the hope that it consumes everything else that you are.

Thumper may be violent, but far more importantly, it is intimate. Its intensity is not in the service of punishment, but of bonding, removing the line between you and it until the play becomes pure instinct. Its strength is in the ways it forgives you, the way you can regain your footing when you stumble; you can always pick up another stick so long as you keep the beat going on the snare. Thumper is the single best representation of what it felt like to play in a band, to perform with another person, to hear their guitar kick into action the instant you switch from fill to groove. I haven’t played a gig in years and I miss it on an almost elemental level, but Thumper is a nice close second.