Everyone’s heard of Cuphead. Whether you love it or loathe it, you’ve probably seen it rear its 1930’s style mug somewhere, as it proved to be insanely popular upon its release in 2017. I somehow missed out on all of the hype surrounding it since when it was announced, my PC was so mediocre I may as well have had a kettle to play games on. But now with its recent Switch release I had no excuse to keep avoiding it. Still, I only actually got round to it thanks to a stupid Twitter poll I made where I naively expected users of the internet to research the options before picking the next game I played. I was misguided; I know that now.
Cuphead came in first place by a landslide with 64% of votes against Falcon Age, Forager, and Ghost Giant. Two of those games have VR and the internet wanted me to play a game where a sentient piece of pottery shoots magic energy at cartoon characters! Jesus, get some taste. But regardless, this is how I ended up committing myself to a game I only had a mild interest in. I knew it was challenging. I knew it looked gorgeous. But I didn’t really know anything else about what I was in for. Join me on my journey through the Inkwell Isles, as I tell you why Cuphead sucks, and why I stuck with it.
So, let’s begin by explaining what exactly Cuphead is. It’s a painstakingly crafted run ‘n’ gunner made by MDHR Studios and a love letter to games such as Gunstar Heroes and Contra, neither of which I’ve played before. In fact, the only run ‘n’ gun I’ve touched is Metal Slug 3 which I played for all of 33 minutes back in 2015, and haven’t touched since – I’m not experienced in this genre. That’s fine though, since Cuphead ditches the “run” part for all of six levels in favour of focusing on the “gun” as you head up against a world-record breaking amount of 28 bosses (if you count all of King Dice’s mini-boss minions anyway).
Outside of gameplay, its visuals and soundtrack are intimately constructed to emulate the 1930’s era of cartoons. All the artwork was hand-drawn and inked, and only coloured on a computer to cut years off of the development time, and the music was played by a live jazz orchestra, often with multiple takes to allow for variations that go entirely undetected by the vast majority of players, myself included. I’m only aware of this stuff at all thanks to the behind-the-scenes videos available on YouTube which are admittedly, fascinating to watch. It’s clear that Cuphead was a labour of love and entirely faithful to the creators’ vision of their ideal game. And that’s fantastic. Good on them for making a game they wanted to see in the world, especially one so unique in its art style. Did you know though, that of all the awards listed on Cuphead‘s website for its character animation, art design, and music… not a single one is for game design. Now isn’t that telling of something?
While I’m tempted to go into a boss-by-boss analysis of the entire game, I’m sure you have better things to do, so I’ll restrict myself to a few. Three that I feel best sum up my experience with the game and allow me to explore what’s so good and yet so bad about it. It’s hard to pick, but I think I’m going to go with Grim Matchstick, Dr. Kahl’s Robot, and The Devil. I feel like there’s the setup for a joke in there somewhere. A dragon, a robot, and the Devil walk into a bar and say “I’ll have a pint of your best RNG please.” … I see now why I write games reviews instead of stand-up comedy.
Before I get too far in, controls in Cuphead basically come down to move, jump, and shoot, with a few special moves such as power-ups and parries that propel you off pink projectiles (few too many ‘p’s for my liking). But the default controls suck. I remapped as much as I could to the shoulder buttons so I didn’t have to stop shooting every time I wanted to not die. And I especially wanted to not die ’cause I’m a completionist, and S ranks require 3 parries, no damage, 6 special moves, and around a 2 minute time or less. I hope you’re up to speed cause I’m about to dive in.
Let’s begin with Grim Matchstick, infamous among Cuphead players to be one of the most difficult bosses in the game. His first phase includes fireballs and eye lasers (which can be parried) and clouds that scroll away from the dragon. Second phase, the dragon moves and little marching fireballs cover the bottom of the screen, occasionally jumping up at you. Then finally the dancing flames are replaced with a couple extra heads for dragon McGee, who also elects to cover half of the screen with his fat face(s) and start spitting smaller, more annoying fireballs at you. And sometimes he morphs into a flamethrower. Cool, right!?
WRONG. He has a grand total of one parriable atta- wait, is parriable a word? It isn’t. Screw it, I’m using it anyway. He has one parriable attack and if he doesn’t use it three times, you can’t S rank him. You could wait around but then you won’t meet the time requirements. So what’s the next best thing you can do? Simple. Retry, retry, retry, until he starts with the eye lasers. You know what isn’t fun? Wasting my time by making the best way to beat your boss be NOT fighting him 80% of the time. And then filling the 20% of attempts that are viable with tiny ass-hole fireballs that don’t indicate where they’re jumping to, or randomly placed clouds that may offer no avenue of escape from some attacks. Sure, the dragon looks great and is a fun, goofy character. But is he fun to fight? No. Did I feel happy when I beat him? No.I didn’t rage-quit but I rage-won against this thing. I threw my controller (safely onto a nearby cushion cause I’m too poor to go breaking perfectly good controllers) and didn’t touch the game till I’d relaxed with some Animal Crossing first. This was a World 2 boss. And it only gets worse.
Moving onto World 3 and a plane level at that, we have Dr. Kahl’s robot, which I love the design of. It’s basically the Iron Giant, that then explodes to become Dr. Wily from the Mega Man series. The first phase is really interesting because it provides three different weak points that send out their own unique attacks at you, but switch to another when you destroy them, allowing you to craft your own personal strategies as to which order you destroy them in. This is great, cause if you find one attack difficult to avoid, you can hold off triggering it till last, or even get rid of it first if it’s a starting one. Genius design. In the second phase the robot’s head flies away and you have to shoot it down, but this phase can be practically skipped with a special attack. And then there’s the last phase, with Dr. Kahl drifting on his merry way at the right side of the screen.
I don’t know what the devs were thinking here, but it feels like they just ran out of ideas as to how they could ramp up the difficulty for this end-game plane level and just elected to put a shitload of bullets on screen to weave through. Which is fine, bullet hells are a thing, but then they also add giant walls to the mix that slowly try to block your progress to the right side of the screen. And they allow the boss to shoot through these walls while you cannot. Not to mention the frequent appearance of foreground elements covering the gaps you have to sneak your plane through. It’s like being asked to cross-stitch with your eyes closed. You inevitably mess up and are quite likely to hurt yourself. And this phase has so much health, it took two special moves and bullets on top to tear him down. After the well-designed and fun initial phases, Dr. Kahl’s Robot turns to an absolute shit-show of a boss fight that frustrated me to no end, every time I collided with yet another bullet that blocked the solitary gap I had to go through.
And now for Cuphead‘s “pièce de résistance,” the Devil fight. It’s super easy, you just sell your soul to him and boom, game complete. I mean, the alternative is you repeatedly challenge him for nearly 7 hours straight in the late hours of the night, go through the five stages of grief, and come out on the other side questioning your entire approach to playing your games library and wondering why you even wanted to play Cuphead in the first place. Spoilers: I went with the second option. The Devil is the definition of difficult. His attacks are fast, erratic, and require precision timing to evade. And it is a great fight… at first.
There’s a fantastic range of different moves available to the Devil, but every one of them is distinctly telegraphed and can be consistently avoided. There are little devils that run across the screen to mix it up but with the right loadout they can be killed faster than you can say “fuck this boss up the ass, it’s such bullshit.” The second phase is just as good with plenty anticipation and consistent patterns again. Then the third phase comes along and fucks everything up. The play space gets smaller, making it harder to dodge the Devil. And then the Devil brings along an army of imps and some pointy-nosed balloon elephants (or something to that affect) that spit skulls across the screen. And giant poker chips continue to fall from the sky while you try not to fall into the fiery pits of hell beneath your precious few platforms. It’s simply too much. Attacks come from above you and both sides often simultaneously, and the Devil’s hit-box in his eyes is at an awkward angle to hit at all. This phase finished me off far too many times.
Then the last phase required such finicky parry timing that I had to abandon my much loved smoke bomb upgrade (which provided an invincible dash move) for an automatic parry item, making the game ridiculously hard since I’d had invincible dashes the entire game prior. Honestly, having an invincible dash by default would make for a much less frustrating game all round, but that’d be too nice of the devs. Can’t have the game being too easy or the feeling of satisfaction won’t hit you when you get that knockout. When I got my final S rank do you know what I felt? Nothing. Which is fitting, cause you receive nothing for getting all the S ranks anyway.
I wasn’t best impressed by Cuphead, in case you hadn’t guessed. You may be wondering why I bothered to complete it at all, if it was such an awful time. There are a few reasons. First of all, this is the internet and if I gave up then it would be a permanent mark against my license to claim I can “git gud” at video games. Secondly, I kinda wanted to show up IndieGamerChick who recently beat the game on regular by absolutely blowing the game out of the water (mission accomplished). Thirdly, and maybe most importantly, I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it. And I did. I did it all, every last drop. It somehow took me 45 hours according to my Switch profile (I genuinely don’t know where all that gameplay time came from) but I have unequivocally, well and truly beaten Cuphead.
There’s also the fact that I’m obsessive about completing games and often commit myself entirely to focusing on a single task till it’s done, frequently leading to self-destructive behaviour and getting nothing of any actual importance done. Like I said, I spent 45 hours completing Cuphead over the past 2 weeks and fought the Devil for 7 hours straight even though I was exhausted, frustrated, and numb. But Cuphead isn’t all bad. It won awards for its art and animation for a reason, as it is absolutely gorgeous to look at. At the end of the day though it is a video game and not a cartoon, and it is an absolute nightmare to play. It’s repetitive, rage-inducing, and rudimentary.
I’m going to put Cuphead up against another game I played recently, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. Both are difficult games that require you to steadily improve and learn enemy patterns to progress. Cuphead however, lacks a lot of depth. Most of the guns are used simply by holding shoot down constantly, and all you have to do is pick the right one based on where it’s safe to stand against a boss. You’ll just find your favourite or use whatever everyone online recommends, and all of the bosses have no weaknesses or resistances to different weapons. And you know I mentioned the smoke bomb earlier. There was a grand total of ONE fight where it wasn’t the best charm for me to bring in. The other perks add hearts or make parries easier, and are simply boring.
Sekiro‘s prosthetics let you launch fire, or throw shurikens, and actually trigger a unique response from enemies, unlike Cuphead where all the feedback you get is a lame little flashing effect on the boss. I never had any reason to ditch the smoke bomb in Cuphead because, the game never gave me one. Cuphead has no incentive to go back and replay it with new items or weapons unless you’re insanely masochistic or simply enjoy doing the same thing over and over incessantly. And that sucks. I felt like I banged my head on my skill ceiling after a few hours and still had half the game to go, where I proceeded to keep banging my head against it.
The way I see it, Cuphead is tantamount to a really pretty NES game. It lacks content due to the insane amount of effort that went into every asset in the game, and to compensate has a ridiculous level of randomly generated difficulty to justify the price tag and make it last longer. You can say that the RNG stops repeat plays being the same but once you’ve seen one fireball you’ve seen them all. “What’s old is new” after all, and Cuphead is a game built around an old game design philosophy with an old, but mostly abandoned, art style to boot. I’d say if it weren’t for its art style, Cuphead really would have nothing new to offer and would probably be lost in the depths of steam’s cesspool of budget titles like every other attempt to feed off of nostalgia to achieve success. Thank god it looks so damn great, huh. Still, I recommend just watching a let’s play because you’ll get everything worthwhile you ever could out of Cuphead anyway. I don’t regret playing it though. At least now I know never to trust the internet to pick games for me again.
I bought a digital copy of Cuphead for Switch with my own money.
Find Cuphead on Switch here: https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/cuphead-switch/