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Have You Played... Thumper?

Things that go thump in the night

The little beetle in thumper speeding along a track into a red and purple void

Have You Played?is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.

Thumper leaves no room for anything but itself. It floods from your eyes to your ears to your brainstem, dissolving conscious experience into grinds and jumps and failure. The rhythm won't release you. You'll have to earn your freedom.

You're a space beetle out to destroy a skull from the future, but don't worry about that. Worry about what's right in front of you; the lights you need to slam, the walls you need to scrape. Thumper is an assault course guilty of grievous bodily harm: skip the trial, throw away the key.

Thumper sculpts you into the kind of being that can stomach Thumper. New obstacles appear at a paradoxically gentle pace, building and building on a central refrain that hammers into your fingers. The result short-circuits consideration, jumps electrically to impulse. You buzz and bump through a kaleidoscope that clearly wants to eat you, and somehow make it through the other side.

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Matt Cox avatar
Matt Cox: Once the leader of Rock Paper Shotgun's Youth Contingent, Matt is an expert in multiplayer games, deckbuilders and battle royales. He occasionally pops back into the Treehouse to write some news for us from time to time, but he mostly spends his days teaching small children how to speak different languages in warmer climates.
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Thumper

PS4, Xbox One, PC, Nintendo Switch

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