The Cosmic Horror That Fuels Thumper
Experience eldritch terror at top speed.
In The Tomb, one of the earliest short stories penned by H.P. Lovecraft, protagonist Jervas Dudley remarks upon the particular midsummer afternoon that prefaced his surrender to madness: “In such surroundings the mind loses its perspective; time and space become trivial and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric past beat insistently upon the enthralled consciousness.” Here, he was describing an otherwise fine day in the woods, except one tainted by the discovery of a hillside tomb whose padlocked entrance had possessed him with a gnawing curiosity.
This distortion of reality, often told from the lens of an increasingly unstable narrator, is a hallmark of the horror sub-genre birthed from the mind of Lovecraft. His stories of maddening encounters with the unknown have given rise to tentacled alien gods, ancient architectural anomalies, and the creeping existential dread that overtakes the witnesses of such cosmic horrors.
Newer forms of fiction continue to explore these tropes—some even subverting the bigotry and xenophobia of the original texts—including those told through video games. There are titles like The Sinking City and Call of Cthulhu that delve directly into Lovecraft’s world-building, while others such as Bloodborne and Sundered conjure eldritch horrors in an original setting. Bloodthirsty cults, grotesque monsters, and monolithic cities are corporeal aspects of the genre that translate very well in action games, but what of the abstract deconstructions of the mind that characters like Jervas Dudley often undergo? Though perhaps inadvertently, there is Thumper: a game of breakneck terror and ecstasy that unfolds across a mind-altering Lovecraftian hellscape.
A two-man project by indie studio Drool, Thumper is what its creators call a “rhythm violence” game. Using just a single stick and a button, you control a space beetle speeding along an endless highway undulating to a crushing synth soundtrack. Most levels are split over two dozen checkpoints that take you faster and faster towards increasingly tight obstacles. It only takes two ill-timed movements to kill your little chrome bug: one hit to destroy your metallic carapace, and another to obliterate you from the course.
The aggressive simplicity of Thumper’s mechanics is a devious manifestation of monomania, a mental state where you obsess about a single thing until it consumes you entirely. The game fixes your gaze to a single track as you train your peripheral vision to anticipate the obstacles ahead. Press A over a blue light. Drift left or right along a red curve. Push up to leap over a thorny hurdle. Tilt down to land. Play long enough and you enter a dissociated state where your motor skills react instinctively to each split-second prompt. In this entranced state, there is no more you; just the beetle and the path ahead.
It’s a wild case of highway hypnosis not dissimilar to the fugue state that Lovecraft’s characters fall under. In his story, Jervas immediately confesses his growing fixation on plumbing the tomb’s secrets, an obsession not helped by his extreme introversion and tendency to avoid people who might otherwise dissuade him. After standing guard almost nightly at the tomb’s locked entrance, he hears voices whispering in the dark that seem to tell him what to do: “I do not think I was either astounded or panic-stricken, but I know that I was greatly and permanently changed that night. Upon returning home I went with much directness to a rotting chest in the attic, wherein I found the key which next day unlocked with ease the barrier I had so long stormed in vain.”
Many characters in Lovecraft’s compendium of tales also experience the same obsessive state, albeit in a condition that often leads to their mental demise. These parallels with the hypnotic effect of playing Thumper become much clearer when you also consider the design of each level.
In The Call of Cthulhu, a sailor by the name of Johansen recalls his encounter with the sinister portal that housed a great, sleeping horror: “He had said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours.” When its great doors finally began to open, he described how it “moved anomalously in a diagonal way, so that all the rules of matter and perspective seemed upset.” This depiction of hyperbolic geometry figures all throughout Lovecraft’s works, such as in the ancient, pre-human city told of in At The Mountains of Madness, or in the hieroglyphic monolith that appears in Dagon.
These incalculable shapes, seemingly designed to disorient any poor mortal that looks upon them, also define the shifting landscapes of Thumper. As soon as the music begins pounding, a level that opens in a black void instantly gives way to a kaleidoscopic highway of neon prisms, metallic feelers, and twisting ribbons. The effect is utterly mind-numbing, especially combined with the velocity in which your space beetle races past them.
It’s also a very violent experience: turning a corner hits you with the shrill, grinding sound of metal against metal. The distant drums that pound the beat rumble louder and louder as the game’s speed picks up. Riding through a tunnel cuts your field of view and makes each claustrophobic turn a gamble for your life. The only way to stop is to quit the game or crash into an obstacle. Survive long enough and you’ll be met with bosses ripped straight from Lovecraft’s visual identity: a seething geometric entity, a figure made of a mass of tentacles, and the cacodaemonic Crakhed himself, the Cthulhu of Thumper’s mythos. Just like Lovecraft wrote, “It was nightmare itself, and to see it was to die.”
Most importantly, what makes Thumper a true experience of cosmic horror is its way of putting you in fear and awe of a spectacle that you have no understanding of. It’s a unique game that’s almost theosophical: take control of the highway’s power by succumbing to the ecstasy of the ride. Hesitate and the wave of euphoria crashes into oblivion. In this way, Thumper’s only distinction from Lovecraft’s stories of existential dread is in allowing the player to harness the madness to their advantage. As you recover from each brutal death, you become intimate with each menacing obstacle in the road. As you master the game, your little space beetle landing each trick at speeds of cosmic proportions, you become an unstoppable bug out of hell—the very stuff that tales of horror are made of.