Thumper

Thumper’s fast rhythm action suits focused play sessions: across nine levels, simple controls carry you through hazards and boss fights. At the current tracked low, it costs ≈ $1.28 at Kinguin. For a solo player drawn to its intense pace and original soundtrack, this is a tightly defined experience, with full controller support on Steam PC. At $19.99 on Kinguin, Thumper costs less than its $19.99 Steam price for the same edition.

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91%Steam Reviews4.1K reviews86Metacritic/10084OpenCritic/100

Released: Oct 10, 2016

Rhythm · Indie · Action · Psychedelic · Great Soundtrack

KinguinThumper PC Steam CD Key (valid until July, 2027)·Platform:·Checked 2026-10-28~~~ $22.25~~-94%from~ $1.28(~ €1.15)ALL-TIME LOWSave $18.71 vs SteamBuy now

GAMIVOThumper Global·Platform:·Checked 2026-10-28-93%from~ $1.40(~ €1.26)ALL-TIME LOWBuy now

K4GThumper Steam CD Key·Platform:·Checked 2026-10-28~~~ $22.24~~-93%from~ $1.61(~ €1.45)ALL-TIME LOWBuy now

EnebaThumper Steam Key GLOBAL·Platform:·Checked 2026-10-28-91%~ $1.74ALL-TIME LOWBuy now

CDKeysThumper PC·Platform:·Checked 2026-10-28~~~ $21.25~~-91%from~ $1.98(~ £1.49)ALL-TIME LOWBuy now

Steam·Platform:·United States Steam official price~ $19.99Buy now

Humble BundleThumper·Platform:·Checked 2026-10-28~ $19.99Buy now

GGselThumper РФ+СНГ+ВЕСЬ МИР Steam КЛЮЧ·Platform:·Checked 2026-10-28from~ RUB 126.88Credit/Debit CardBuy now

All-time low ~ $3.99across Steam & third-party storesat the recorded all-time low

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Price History

Past 36 months · Updated daily

Historical Low~ $1.622026-07Current Low Across Stores~ $1.62KinguinAt its historical low now

Prices cover Steam and 39 authorized stores; only legitimate offers are counted. The chart shows weekly market-wide lows and Steam's official price across the past 36 months.

01About Thumper

Thumper combines rhythm action with blistering speed and a nightmarish journey through space. As a space beetle, you race along an endless track, learning moves and crashing through obstacles to an original pounding soundtrack before facing boss battles. Steam player reviews: 91%% positive from 4,071 reviews. Supported interface languages: Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese-Brazil, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Swedish, and Turkish.

Credits

Composer

Brian Gibson

Developer

Drool

Publisher

Drool

Steam player reviews

91%positiveVery Positive4,071 Steam reviews

Lowest recorded in 36 months

$1.622026-07-30 · KinguinBase game · same records as the chart above; USD history, not a regional Steam low.

Language support

Language	Interface	Subtitles	Audio
Simplified Chinese	Yes	—	—
Traditional Chinese	Yes	—	—
English	Yes	—	—

Show 15 more languages

Language	Interface	Subtitles	Audio
French	Yes	—	—
Italian	Yes	—	—
German	Yes	—	—
Spanish	Yes	—	—
Japanese	Yes	—	—
Korean	Yes	—	—
Portuguese-Brazil	Yes	—	—
Danish	Yes	—	—
Dutch	Yes	—	—
Finnish	Yes	—	—
Norwegian	Yes	—	—
Polish	Yes	—	—
Russian	Yes	—	—
Swedish	Yes	—	—
Turkish	Yes	—	—

Steam PC edition data · 2026-10-29

02Before you buy

Play and control

The Steam PC version is single-player and has full controller support.

Languages

Supported interface languages are English, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese.

03Frequently asked questions

What do you do in the game?

You control a space beetle racing along a track, tackling obstacles to the rhythm of the music.

Are there multiple levels?

Yes. The Steam PC version has nine levels and boss battles.

Does the PC version support VR?

Yes. The description lists SteamVR and Oculus as VR options.

Popular Steam reviews

Native-language selection · 10 reviews

Selected helpful reviews in this language show both recommendations and criticisms. This selection does not represent the overall positive rating; opinions reflect the version reviewed.

RecommendedSteam player

06/23/2017

So far I've completed 2 levels and got at least three angry boners. I can't remember the last time a game would make me this angry without actually making me want to ragequit. Weirdly enough, this is also the first game that I'd actually rather play in VR. And on drugs. Good game, 10/10.Show moreShow less

3.4 hours at review148 people found this helpful

Not recommendedSteam player

11/24/2016

Thumper is a game that should have been perfect for me. I'm a musician focused on drums, I love drones and dark ambient, I love the demoscene, I loved guitar hero, I love bullet hell shooters and masochistic difficulties, the list of reasons I should love this game just goes on and on. But I really don't. Instead, Thumper is a slog to play that deals less with rhythmicality than rote memorisation. It goes out of its way to screw with any accumulated sense of rhythm over levels that take far too long to complete to ever want to return to (upwards of 15 minutes each). A gimmick of the engine is that every successful interaction the player has with the game triggers percussion, which means if your rhythm is off, the triggered sound is off too. The background audio functions as a sort of metronome intended to give you something to correct to, but the audio mix reduces that beat to a noisy growl under the din of your own off-center beats, meaning as levels increase in intensity your own off-ness creeps into your entire performance: Since the beats sound "right" to you but are in fact off by some margin, you slowly but surely creep closer to the offset where the game determines you straight up missed it. Among the reliable beats are the turns (which go off when they must as opposed to when you turn), but the levels of syncopation and sections of silence mean they are about as useful as a person next to you randomly bumping into you as you play. It's just maddening. Thumper at its highest intensity (if you're not counting the endless rinse-repeat memorisation of drilling down a checkpoint until you perfect it) boils down to reading audio tells, but again the audio mix fails it. The thing about such a noisy soundscape is you run out of room to communicate with subtlety in the high frequencies. I never got comfortable with the tells for the elevated notches for instance (I was surprised to find out they even have one), and the game frequently sends you through turning and twisting tunnels depriving you of any visual tell to go by. No audio mix options to tweak the game to your own system exacerbate this. The biggest failure of the game, IMO, is in its inability to build and sustain a rhythm, opting instead to give you frequent bouts of silence and random bouts of syncopation. It doesn't matter if you've a looping drum roll going in the background if the actual beats you have to hit on top of that are so haphazardly placed you are almost never allowed to "get into it". Add to this the game's love of animations and audio cues that don't have bearing on the rhythm whatsoever (the beetle hop when you release the boost is a constant annoyance for me) as well as frequent messing with time (recovering from a collision and other slowmo) all go into removing any pleasure I could get from what could otherwise be a pounding and satisfying drum session. Instead levels on first encounter are 15-20 minute grinds followed by further grinding checkpoint by checkpoint to build "mastery" that really just comes down to remembering patterns. It just goes on and on and even at its best I don't think it's rewarding my time. Halfway through *level 5* I was just exhausted. No thanks. Thumper is too long, too repetitive, too random, poorly mixed, with a confounding scoring system. When Drool called this Rhythm Violence, irritating the player to the point of needing to punch a pillow wasn't what I thought they had in mind.Show moreShow less

4.5 hours at review427 people found this helpful

RecommendedSteam player

12/05/2016

I only just found out about this game when it released. Saw a few videos and had to get it. I'm a musician, and instructor. Have been playin music for most my life and this game kicked my butt. There's parts of each level that groove and feel "right" while a lot of the rest of the level doesn't seem to fit with the tempo/time signature, (each level number represents it's time signature). It frustrated me a LOT. I felt like the devs put in those groove sections to make it seem like a rhythm game but most the filler was just an out of time mess. I was wrong. The more you learn about the mechanics, which are actually fairly complex for one button and stick, the more you'll apreciate how finely tuned this game is. So, a lot of the patterns don't exactly groove like typical rhythm games, but once you start feeling how all the more advanced scoring mechanics work together, you'll start feeling the music in really interesting ways. It's hard to explain, haha. Yes.... your thumbs will get sore playing this, like... seriously. But man.... when you nail sections and feel how it all fits together there's no comparison to how awesome it makes you feel. There's PLENTY of replay that can be had in this, plus the music will stick with you and make you want to play more just to hear it again. It's worth the price.Show moreShow less

17.4 hours at review125 people found this helpful

Not recommendedSteam player

10/11/2016

>11/12/2016 UPDATE: >Even after so much time after launch people are still reading this, so I will just add this little bit here while keeping the original text at the bottom. >First of all, I want to say that I curently hold all this achievements in this game. This means I've gone through everything that this game has with an S rank. >I still also maintain the opinion that this game is not musical enough, and that you can not predict the thumps by sound alone. The BPMs are too low for any consistent rhythm for the most part. You react a lot more to what you see than what you hear. And for the sake of it I played the game on mute for a while and not much was lost in terms of performance. >I double down on the visual aspects getting in the way of the gameplay argument. The midboss in stage 7 is definetly the hardest part in the game to get an S rank at solely because the visual clutter and the spins are just too much for you to make out what you're supposed to do. To pass it with an S rank I just memorized the pattern and did it by memory. That's not a rhythm game. >I still also think the walls are a bad mechanic. At some point I just learned that the best strat is to buffer all the turns unless the ones in which perfect turns are absolutetly necessary. >Yes. I am aware that walls do have a callsign, but the fact that I wasn't able to notice it at first shows how much this callsign blend in when compared to others. >The restart button was added a while back. I'm aware. >The new mode seems tacked-on and pointless to me. It does not add the replayability a rhythm game needs. The visuals are amazing, but this game lacks the tightness of an actual rhythm game. -The charts are weird: The notes are constantly spread too far apart. It almost feels disconected from the song at some points. It also makes inconsistent decisions in terms of being in syncopation or not. And because of that you start to rely in visual reaction for timings instead of using the beat of the song. -The visuals get in the way of the game: In some levels, you go through tunnels that hides the obstacles ahead, which just doesn't feel like a fair challenge. Specially for S curves in succession. -Walls make you play off-beat: The walls are probably my biggest gripe with this game at the moment. Unlike the other obstacles, walls have no audio cue to them when they spawn. I don't see why, it's inconsistent. Turning at the perfect beat rewards you with a perfect turn, which is what you want, but the game is too harsh on lateness for these, while presenting no punishment other than no bonus score for being early. This makes going for perfect turns too risky, so you go early. But at this point your not on beat, and isn't this a rhythm game? -No quick restart button: This is a minor point, but as a rhythm game player, I want o S everything. So restarting is something that I want to be doing a lot. I don't see why this game doesn't have this feature. This game had a cool idea, but the 4 button game underneath it doesn't feel very good to play.Show moreShow less

25.9 hours at review108 people found this helpful

Not recommendedSteam player

07/01/2017

Thumper presents itself as a rhythm game, but gets so much of the design behind rhythm games wrong that I cannot in good conscious recommend it to fans of the genre. There are plenty of other rhythm games that I'd recommend over Thumper. I list some of them in the sections below. Music Selection Let's start with the music: It's droning percussion without a lot of variation or movement. Find a youtube video of someone playing Thumper. If you like what you hear, then great, maybe this game is for you. If you don't like what you hear, bad news: that's basically all you're going to be hearing the whole game. Most rhythm games have a selection of songs that you can play at your leisure; if there's a song you don't like, no big deal: just don't pick that song, and instead pick the songs you do like. Unfortunately Thumper is structured as a linear game where you play the levels in order, one after the other. And you can't play level N until you've beaten level N-1. Games that did it better: The Bemani series (Dance Dance Revolution, Beatmania/IIDX, Guitar Freaks, DrumMania, etc.), Rock Band, Guitar Hero, etc. all have varied song lists in different genres and style, and let you pick which songs you want to play. Graphics/Aesthetics This is arguably Thumper's strongest selling point, but graphics are only enjoyable insofar that you get to see them. And to see them, you have to actually play through the game. That might sound tautological, but there are rhythm games which understood that a core appeal of their game were the trippy graphics and the synesthetic experience, and thus let you just coast through the game, even if you did extremely poorly, so that you can enjoy the full experience. In contrast, Thumper is fairly unforgiving: your beetle has 2 hit points, and if you make 2 "mistakes" (failling to turn, crashing into a barrier, failing to jump over an obstacle, etc.), you "die" and are sent back to a previous checkpoint. Games that did it better: Rez has beautiful visuals that evolve with the music, and shares a similar aesthetic style (though its tone is less gloomy than Thumper's). Mechanics The core mechanic behind Thumper is call-and-response. The game will present a rhythm involving both audio and visual cues, and then you're supposed to perform the rhythm back to the game. Unfortunately, there are several flaws with the way Thumper implements this mechanic that makes it unsuitable for fans of rhythm games. First of all, of the 5 or so different cues that the game presents, only 1 or 2 (depending on how you count them) involve timing. That is to say, the majority of the gameplay in Thumper does not involve rhythm. There are 5 possible inputs that you can send to the game: Up, down, left, right and action. When there is a glowing spot on the floor, then you need to press the Action button just as the glowing spot passes underneath your beetle. And when you need to perform a stomp-maneuver on the glowing spot, then you need to press the Down button just as it passes underneath your beetle. That's it. For every other cue, you can send the input way in advance of the cue's arrival, and if there are several such cues in a row, you can just keep the relevant button held down to trigger all of them. For example, there's a horizontal barrier which you can only "break through" if you're holding down the Action button. It's not unusual for these barriers to appear in a syncopated rhythm (e.g. note note pause note pause note note note), but it's not clear what the point of that rhythm is, because what you're supposed to do when you encounter such a cue is to just hold down the Action button through the whole thing. Games that did it better: The Rhythm Heaven series is kind of like a Wario Ware for rhythm games: Each song/stage uses the controls in different ways, as if a completely different mini-game. While some of the games might have a "just have the input be held down", they do so for variety's sake, and the majority of the games do ask you to actually perform your input to a rhythm. Input Timing This is somewhat related to the previous sections of mechanics, but the input timing on Thumper is completely off, and the reason it's completely off is a direct result of the design decision they made that the inputs should be "held down ahead of time" as opposed to activated as per the rhythm of the music. Find a video of someone playing the first level of Thumper, and then tap your hands on the quarter notes of the song. While you're doing this, pay attention to when the beetle performs a turning maneuvre. Notice that the beetle turns, and then as the turn ends, a chime plays, and this chime is on the quarter note beat (i.e. synchronized with when you tapped). This is the end of the turning maneuvre, which means that this is the point at which it's okay for the player to actually release the inputs. Which means the player must have entered the input at some earlier time, not on the beat. The game essentially forces you to enter in your inputs "not on the beat", which is very frustrating for a rhythm game. I completely understand their desire to have the chime sound effect land on the beat, or else the game would be frustrating for auditory rather than tactile reasons, but it seems like they could have fixed this design flaw by simply having the chime occur at the start of the turn, rather than at the end, and have the player perform the inputs for the turn on the beat of the song. Games that did it better: Dance Dance Revolution, In The Groove, Beatmania/IIDX, Guitar Hero, etc. all have some concept of "holding down the input". However, they ensured that both the start and the end of these inputs occur on the beat. Further more, they ensured that the "attack" (the moment the player actually presses the input) must occur on the beat (as opposed to Thumper's approach to let the player press the input at any arbitrary point before the beetle needs to perform the maneuvre), which leads to a much more satisfying input experience. Cues Probably Thumper's weakest point as a rhythm game is the quality of its cues. The game uses both audio and visual cues in its call and response system. The audio cues by themselves are not unique enough that you can solely rely on them to play the game without memorization. For example, a "turn" will be signaled by a handclap sound effect. However, you won't know, from just hearing the sound clap, whether you need to turn left or right. And again, Thumper only lets you make 2 mistakes before your beetle dies and is sent back, so simply guessing based on the audio cues is not sufficient. Then what about the visual cues? Here, Thumper struggles due to overprioritizing its aesthetics. The beetle is travelling along a narrow corridor with opaque walls, and the corridor twists and turns. While visually interesting, the end result of this is that when the corridor turns, it blocks the player's view of the upcoming cues. The level design seems to be unaware of this problem, as it repeatedly uses an anti-pattern in several of its stages where the beetle is cued to turn to one side, and immediately needing to turn in the opposite side with no warning (because the cue for the second turn was hidden behind the walls of the curving corridor). When this happens, Thumper is no longer a rhythm game. It becomes a game of reaction time, and/or memorization as you die and then replay that section, but now knowing that two (or three or four) turns in quick succession are going to come. Games that did it better: Groove Coaster is a rhythm game in which your avatar follows a curving path. However, it's able to avoid the pitfall that Thumper falls into by having the path be a simple line with no walls, and thus nothing to "block" the cues.Show moreShow less

1.4 hours at review87 people found this helpful

Not recommendedSteam player

10/29/2016

TL;DR: If you're here for the rhythm aspect, I would stay away until an update fixes some things. If you're here for the high octane, "game-feel" defining gameplay, and don't mind purely reaction-based stuff, this is your game. I bought this game under the assumption that the focus of this game was rhythm. That's not the case, however. Where the game fails as a rhythm game, it succeeds as a reaction/memorization game. Though this game is SO frustratingly close to being an excellent rhythm game, there are a few details that keep it far from that title. The visuals, while absolutely stunning, detract from the clarity of the game mechanics. Whenever you go through tunnels, the wall obstacles make the player turn a sharp corner, which prevents you from seeing obstacles that are around it. It also doesn't help when the color of the tunnel interior matches the orange glow of the wall; making it practically invisible. It cheapens the game's difficulty. Absolutely none of that would be an issue if the audio cues that indicate which obstacles you'll have to avoid next were clear and distinct. They sadly aren't. They are unreasonably quiet, a fact that is painfully clear when the sound of dodging the current obstacle, plus the roaring tribal drums completely eclipse it. The cues also sound too similar to each other. When dozens of sound cues are constantly bombarding your ears, you need to be able to distinguish between them subconsciously. Vary the pitches, make the sounds have fundamentally different textures, anything you can to make them clear as crystal. The current system is simply too muddy to be useful at all. All in all, if you like reaction-based "endless runner" style games and aren't afraid to do some track memorization for some of the S ranks, you'll really enjoy this game. This honestly may be one of the best "feeling" games I've ever played. Every time you clang into a turn or crash through a bar, it leaves a palpable and utterly satisfying impact. If you came here expecting a new rhythm game to grind at and master, you're gonna be disappointed. I really hope the devs touch up the game and really nail the little things, so you can play the game musically. I can't help but feel a bit mislead by the "Rhythm Violence" tagline, as I don't feel it quite meets the standards of a rhythm game. For me personally, it's not worth $20 in it's current state, that's the reason I refunded the game. I would be more than happy to re-purchase it when these issues are addressed or when the game goes on sale. Thanks for reading. (I've said the word "rhythm" way too many times.)Show moreShow less

1.7 hours at review81 people found this helpful

Source: original Steam user reviews. Helpful votes are an archived snapshot, not live data. Last collected: 08/15/2026.