Thumper: I'm not understanding why this is a thing

The only reason why I have this "game" at all is because of the fact that PlayStation gave a bunch of games away during their April "stay at home" initiative. I also want everyone to know that this "generosity" on the part of PlayStation appears to be a promotion for their VR headsets in disguise since half of the games are either only playable on VR or are VR optional. There is no way that this is a coincidence. You know what they say... There is no such thing as "free."

Anyway, Thumper at first seemed to be a pretty interesting gaming experience but in the end it is kind of autistic nightmare of frustration. The same way in which Guitar Heros was a game that a few people absolutely excelled at, the rest of us will never reach the level of timing necessary to excel at this game.

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The way this game works is that it isn't really a game so much as it is a test of your ability to memorize the playfield and hit buttons and push your control stick in the correct direction at very precise intervals. You are some sort of beetle type creature on a track that is heading towards god-only-knows-what in the distance.

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You are only entitled to one mistake before your outer shell is shed and then if you make another one you have to go back to a checkpoint which at times, can be annoyingly far back from where you "died." This is especially true during the "boss fights" where there are multiple stages of the "boss" that you have to defeat and losing at any one of the phases will result in you needing to go all the way back to the start.

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I will admit that I didn't get very far into this game before I quit because the gameplay does adapt a little bit over time but for the most part it is an exercise in beautiful monotony. There are only something like 4 possible obstacles that you face in the entire game (from what I have read, I only encountered 3 of them) and while it is pretty neat how your button presses or slides to one side or the other does line up with the thumping music that is playing, the gameplay never changes beyond that.

Perhaps if you are one of the 12 people that actually own a PS VR headset the experience would be better for you or maybe you would just have a seizure, one of the two seems likely. However, for regular peons like myself that don't really WANT to hit a button at just the right nanosecond in order to succeed, this game is just frustrating and it is basically the same thing over and over again.

I would never pay for a game like this and like I said, I only have it because they gave it away. For me, I like a game where there are more than one way to do a particular portion of a game correctly and this game is severely lacking in that regard - there is only one way to do any part of the game correctly and there are probably some people out there that enjoy this sort of thing but I think that for a vast majority of gamers, this is not a game at all, it is just a reason to throw your wireless controller across the room in frustration - which wasn't a big deal back in the Atari and early Nintendo days but these days, this sort of rage quitting can be a very expensive mistake.

I only played it for about 30 minutes before I knew this is not for me and I feel as though most people will probably feel the same despite the praise (paid?) that it got from a wide-variety of reviewers.

I don't know if you can still get this game for free or not but if so, I encourage you to download it and see if you are able to make it through more than an hour on your first go. I would bet that you don't.