I only played an hour at a time but no matter what I always left with my eyes hurting from getting so focused, and my ears needing great silence for a while. This is kind of the point, it's a good thing. Thumper does absolute fucking violence on your senses, adapt to the rhythm or die. The game only bonuses you for being Perfect, meaning the worse you do on the track, the less it'll give you a chance to live. You have to be fit to survive. The end is great too, although, I think by the last hour I had numbed to the survival. I actually left the final boss feeling a bit lukewarm! I think Thumper relies too heavily on its repetition. It repeats to grind you, yeah, but then once you get used to it there's not really a trick it has left for you. And mastering Thumper isn't quite rewarding, because the mechanics when you strip away the aesthetic and that compounding pain, is too simple. I really wish the game did SO much more to break you, not simply by difficulty, but by overloading. My favorite moments were not in the compounding overwhelming synethesia, but simply not being able to even use my peripheral vision to figure out what to do next in the track because I was hanging on to doing the next steps JUST RIGHT so i was no longer hanging on a twig. Suffuse this game with more danger. I hope there's an inspired successor to this that goes that extra mile.