Ten years ago, at All Tomorrow’s Parties, a now-defunct music festival held occasionally in the rain-harangued British seaside town of Camber Sands, I attended a show by Lightning Bolt, a noise-rock duo from Providence, Rhode Island. They had set up in the center of a grubby hall at Pontins, England’s second-best-known budget holiday park. At the band’s request, security had allowed only thirty or so festival-goers into a venue that could comfortably have accommodated a thousand, leaving plenty of room on the beery carpet for dancing, or possibly rioting. We clustered in the round as Brian Gibson began to flay his bass and Brian Chippendale, wearing a wrestler’s mask, assaulted his drum kit, his voice blaring primally through a microphone taped to his cheek. The performance was disorienting, both intimate and savage, like the first moments after an accident, before time resumes its normal speed and the damage can be measured.

A few weeks ago, Gibson launched Thumper, a virtual-reality-enabled video game that captures all of the menace of that live show. (Gibson and his co-creator, Marc Flury, have coined a fresh classification to describe its texture: a “rhythm violence game.”) Thumper invites you, the player, to wear a mask of your own, in the form of the PlayStation VR headset, which also débuted earlier this month. You inhabit the body of what can only be described as a space beetle—a glowing insect with pincers and a chromed-out carapace—which careers into the screen along an undulating track, accompanied by a thudding bass drum and the occasional euphoric chord. Thumper is a kind of weaponized Guitar Hero, a game of musical Simon Says in which each level ends with a face-off against an alien boss, which must be defeated not with arms but with rhythm.

As the beetle sweeps along curves and down slopes, the game provides onscreen musical prompts. These appear on the horizon as distant dots, then swiftly grow in size and brilliance, as if you’d started reeling in a fish only to find you’d hooked a nebula. Each dot corresponds to an audio sample, which you activate by hitting a button with your thumb. Strike it in time and the sample plays in perfect tempo, earning you a haptic buzz of the controller and, when you’re squaring off against that alien, firing a blast of light into its gullet. Miss the dot and your beetle’s shell cracks. Miss a second time and it’s game over. As you progress, the dots come more quickly, and in more complicated variations. It’s as if the musical staff were not a channel on the page for written notation but a toboggan run, with speed measured in beats per minute rather than miles per hour.

Thumper is a stylistic exception to much of the PSVR’s current lineup, which tends toward realism rather than abstraction. Typical titles include Until Dawn: Rush of Blood, a haunted roller-coaster ride in which you shoot balloons and slay evil, lunging clowns; Driveclub VR, which lets you tear along Scottish roads in a selection of enticing cars, rendered right down to the meticulous stitching on the driver’s seat; Job Simulator, which puts you in the role of a gourmet chef, an office worker, or a convenience-store clerk; and Headmaster, a boot camp for wannabe soccer stars. Thumper, by contrast, takes place in an esoteric, neon-lit space unlike anywhere in our world. There are no characters or scenes to inspire recognizable “presence,” the V.R. buzzword for the sense of having been bodily transposed from one familiar location to another. The game whittles reality to a fine point, an approach that, counterintuitively, provides one of the most memorable V.R. trips so far released.

In spite of its punkish departure from the norm, Thumper in fact fits into a clear line of artistic endeavor. Fifteen years ago, when virtual reality had yet to make the transition back from obsolescence to expectation, the Japanese game designer Tetsuya Mizuguchi created Rez, a game that fuses high-speed interaction, arcane visuals, and club music to beguiling effect. Mizuguchi, who started his career making racing games for the arcades and later worked with Michael Jackson on the fantastically barmy and camp rhythmic dance game Space Channel 5, wanted to create a game that would mimic the experience of synesthesia, in which sound can be experienced as color. (He dedicated the project to the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, an outspoken synesthete.) For many, Rez expanded the definition of what a video game could be. It took the medium’s first (and, regrettably, defining) principle—shoot them before they shoot you—and abstracted it.

Like Gibson, Mizuguchi has seen in virtual reality a place where his original vision can be more fully realized. On the same day the PSVR came out, his studio released Rez Infinite, a reboot of the original. As in Thumper, your avatar—a floating human that evolves and devolves according to how well you play the game—flies along a track in sync with thudding electronic music, in this case supplied by artists such as Adam Freeland and Coldcut. Here, though, matching the music is not the focus; instead, you shoot at incoming targets while sailing past wireframe temples, through circuit-board valleys, and over sound-wave seabeds. The game’s final stage, Area X, dispenses with the track and allows you to float freely through star-streaked space, golden particles filling your wake as you maneuver alongside gigantic jellyfish-like creatures and fire your laser. One critic recently described the experience as being “like viewing 2001: A Space Odyssey on 70mm for the first time, having previously only watched it … on some scratchy old Maxell VHS tape.” Despite Rez’s underlying familiarity, in other words, V.R. elevates the trance-like journey into something richer and stranger.

One other PSVR game shares its artistic lingo with Thumper and Rez Infinite. SuperHyperCube was inspired by Nōkabe (“Brain Wall”), a recurring segment on a Japanese TV game show in which contestants must twist their bodies into increasingly unnatural shapes in order to fit through cut-outs in a series of rapidly advancing Styrofoam walls. The show’s pratfall humor, which has been exported to the U.K., the U.S., and Australia as “Hole in the Wall,” is traded here for a clean, Kubrickian, retro-futuristic chic. Using the controller, you twist a mass of cubes, rather than a body, into shape; each time you squeeze through a snug gap successfully, a new cube is added to the cluster. An early version of the game, created in 2008, employed anaglyphic stereoscopy, a kind of 3-D effect triggered by wearing those paper glasses with the red-and-blue lenses that became popular in the nineteen-fifties. But, as with Mizuguchi’s Rez, it wasn’t until the reëmergence of V.R. that the concept blossomed into its ideal form. While SuperHyperCube is, at heart, a puzzle game, demanding the thoughtfulness of a Rubik’s solver rather than a sportsman’s physical instincts, the ever-approaching walls ground the abstract with bodily peril.

The success of the three games, comfortably the strongest in PSVR’s launch lineup, runs contrary to the prevailing narrative, which holds that realistic re-creations of our world are where the emerging medium’s power lies. Undoubtedly, part of V.R.’s appeal is its capacity to enable us to visit places too remote, too dangerous, or too expensive to otherwise reach. Documentarians have already begun using V.R. to allow us to experience life through the eyes of another and even to become witnesses to current events from the perspective of a participant rather than a bystander. Thumper, Rez Infinite, and SuperHyperCube offer the counterargument—that V.R.’s most alluring promise is found in the imagined, the intangible, and the unrecognizable places to which it transports us.