Cuphead is one of the best games.
What Is It? Cuphead is a 2017 2D shooter from Studio MDHR. The game notably features a hand drawn art style referencing early Disney-era visuals and a soundtrack performed by a big band. It stands as one of my favorite games ever and there will be very minimal attempts at objectivity in this review, just so you are prepared.
You control Cuphead or Mugman, a pair of brothers who find themselves owing a massive debt to the devil. Whoops. To repay this, you must collect the soul contracts of various bosses around the Cuphead world before facing off against the devil’s apprentice (King Dice) and then the devil himself.
The game is played through a series of levels broken up across three islands. You are generally free to pick whichever level you’d like next but some are locked behind others and you can’t move to the next island without fully completing the prior. There are three distinct level types: boss fight, run-and-gun, and aerial combat. The boss fights are the most abundant in the game, you are placed onto a static screen against a massive boss. You can run, shoot, jump, dash, and parry from the start. Upgrades will allow special moves to be added to the repertoire.
Run-and-gun fights are 2D platforming levels where you must run to the right (and sometimes up) until you reach the end. Aerial combat levels place you in a plane with a standard gun, special attack, and the ability to miniaturize yourself which speeds you up to better avoid projectiles at the expense of a small range for your weapon.
The three level types add a nice bit of variety to the game, but they do all share a common core; this a bullet hell game. The screen will constantly be littered with projectiles coming your way and you will have to be very good at firing while jumping, dashing, and ducking to avoid these projectiles. By default, it’s three hits and you’re dead in Cuphead.
Along the way you will be able to purchase weapon and charm upgrades which can vary your tactics a bit. For a beginner, the homing weapon, which will find something to hit even if you fire it in the wrong direction, is a nice option as you can mostly focus on avoiding getting hit yourself. The drawback is that it is extremely weak so fights take forever if that’s the only weapon you use. The spread gun has a very short range but fires a handful of bullets and does big damage. There are a handful of other options, but they all act to give players options to suit their preferred playstyle. Charms also allow customization, I enjoyed the extra HP charm for my initial playthroughs, extending my life by a third was vital.
You will die a lot in Cuphead. I believe my first playthrough had a deathcount over 1000. My fifth playthrough, which I completed just before writing this review, I had 178. Each time you die, you will be able to immediately restart the level and try again. You must learn the patterns of the bosses and each of its various phases. The fight will shift drastically a few times, making each boss feel like three or four.
The length of the game will depend heavily on your abilities to navigate a try-and-die, bullet hell, shmup game which is mostly a series of very difficult boss fights. Technically speaking, each fight can be over in about two minutes. For most mortals, however, you will spend anywhere from 15 to 90 minutes on each fight the first time you try it out. Learn a pattern, die, repeat.
The Best Part: The pure elation that comes from finally beating a level that took you way too long. There are very, very few times where Cuphead feels unfair. There is randomization with which attacks a boss will use, but each attack does have its own pattern to learn and master. The controls are responsive and the jump/dash combo gives you plenty of room to escape just about anything you see coming. All of this is to say, the difficulty in Cuphead is huge, but it is not frustrating, at least not for me. After a death, the game shows you on a timeline how close to the end you were. Even times when I was clearly one or two shots away from winning, I was never angry at the game. I knew how to dodge the thing that killed me; I just didn’t. As someone who does not typically gravitate towards notably difficult games, Cuphead finds the perfect balance for my personal tastes.
The Worst Part: There is a “Simple” difficulty level which makes the bosses a bit more accessible. My son had a blast playing through the game with this setting until we found out that you can’t face the final boss until you beat everything on Normal. I’m not here to argue about the integrity of videogame difficulty levels, but I will absolutely complain that an easier mode is offered but leads to an incomplete experience.
The Verdict: Cuphead is one of my favorite games ever and I’d give it serious consideration as my top favorite. The difficulty is steep but incredibly rewarding to overcome, with the instant retries and short levels begging for “one more try!” over and over again.
I have no complaints about the game, it stands as close to a perfect 10 as possible in my book. The DLC (Delicious Last Course) is a wonderful addition as well, increasing the content of the game somewhere around 30-40%.
The game very much isn’t for you if you don’t want the challenge of learning all of a boss’s attack through dozens of retries so you can know enough to finally clear the level. It’s a very specific type of difficulty that won’t appeal to all.
Cuphead masters both the presentation and execution in a way that makes it difficult to find peers. From the moment you see the game, you know this is something different. A wonderful, hand-drawn art style with booming music that is masking a brutally difficult game. I think it is this contradiction which has led to Cuphead standing above hordes of similar games and why it will continue to be considered a classic over time.
How to Play: PlayStation 4*, Xbox One/Series, Switch 1/2, PC
*console played on for this review
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