Original Publication Date: 12/05/2019
Re-published 20/06/2022
Cuphead
If there’s one thing that should be clear from the kinds of games I’ve talked about here – games like Hollow Knight and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice – I’m a bit of a glutton for challenging boss fight focused games. And few have scratched the itch in a more wonderful way than Cuphead, which I’m playing for the first time on the recent Nintendo Switch version. Wading through vegetables, clowns and large dice-headed men, I somehow found one of the best games I’ve played in a very long time.
For the last two or three weeks, Cuphead, developed by fledgling indie dev Studio MDHR, has consumed my time. I had dabbled into the game a bit on the PC, but the recent release on the Nintendo Switch has been a huge blow to me. The ability to just pick up and play, anywhere, and get my ass handed to a variety of weird cartoon monsters has just sucked up all my free time. I truly do think this is the best way to play Cuphead – there was nothing wrong with playing it on PC, or I assume Xbox One, but just like with so many other games on the Switch, the ability to pick up and play elevates the experience to something else entirely.
The gameplay of Cuphead is fairly simple – you play as Cuphead (or, as I prefer, his best friend? Brother? Mugman) and to liberate yourself from the threat of The Devil, take down the many inhabitants of Inkwell Isles. To do this, Cuphead can fire a variety of bullet-based projecticles from his hands, or transform into a plane for a few select boss fights that play like more classic scrolling arcade games. There are six different weapons to try out, and a variety of additional charms that give Cuphead special abilities, like more health, or vanishing during a dash. New weapons can be bought from the Shop, with gold coins obtained from hidden locations, or the game's six ‘Run-and-Gun’ levels, sections that are more traditional platformers, where Cuphead avoids enemies to reach the end of the level. There isn’t much story to the game, overall, but the few cutscenes it has are all charming, and with the Switch port (and an update pushed to the other platforms) they’ve added additional animation to them, giving them all new life of their own and look simply stunning. Seriously, MDHR – you need to chill out with the animation. You guys need rest.
What can I even say about Cuphead’s many, many boss fights. Well, for one, they’re among the most imaginative, challenging, and exciting in all of gaming. One moment I was fighting a pack of rambunctious vegetables, the next a deranged clown-turned-carousel, and finally The Devil himself. Half the fun of this game is just seeing what each boss has in store for you, and I’m pleased to say that almost, without fail, are simply joys to fight. I’ve always been a boss fight kind of player – overcoming these kinds of hurdles are some of my favorite experiences in gaming, and that goes double for some of these. And Cuphead does not pull its punches – the game expects you to die a lot, to spend time learning the patterns and phases of each of its more than fifteen boss fights. But (for the most part) the difficulty never feels overbearing – I very rarely felt like I was making zero progress on a boss fight, and every death came with a lesson on how to fight the next round. The fights are also short enough (the majority of the full fights only came out at just over two minutes on a winning run) that losing doesn’t feel like the greatest kick in the pants, though with the game telling you how close you are to the finish line, it can be a little disheartening to lose with a bullet to go!
Half of what makes these boss fights so amazing though, are their varied and simply unparalleled art and animation. I’m willing to stake a bold claim right here – Cuphead might be the single best looking game I’ve ever played. Yep. The amount of care, detail and precision put into every single frame of this game is simply jaw-dropping. It’s been said a thousand times, but playing Cuphead is like literally playing some madhouse version of a 30’s cartoon. There are times where I’ve literally flat out died because I was basking into the incredible designs I was looking at. It also never felt like they were reusing ideas at all during the game – when one moment I can be looking at a flower using it’s own head as a machine gun, and the next I’ll be battling a gigantic, screen-framing genie, it’s marvelous to think they’re from the same game, with the same art style.
I have to gush a little bit, but my god, The Devil is easily the best boss in the game, and without a doubt one of my favorite’s in all video games. It’s just the perfect kind of boss fight – the capstone to an exciting, pulse-pounding game; brand new mechanics, again, like nothing else in the rest of it. And most of all, its final moments are some of the tensest, most terrifying I’ve played in a long time, with the amount of precision needed to navigate its final hurdle. They really lean into doing some wild things with having The Devil as the final boss, some things you really wouldn’t expect, like his detaching head, or his dragon attack. Additionally, it shows some of The Devil’s adorable purple lackys, who are so cute I can’t really get enough of them. If there’s one kind of merch I want from this game, it’s them. I’m also particularly fond of the boss fights against Werner Wernam for its honestly hilarious twist, and the adorably fun animation presented against Grim Matchstick.
Not everything is perfect in the world of Cuphead, though. Whilst I wouldn’t call any of the fights flat out bad, the fight against Queen Bee Rumour Honeybottoms is far and away my least favorite, being a vertical auto scroller where random platforms can spell your doom. Another auto scroller, against the dragon Grim Matchstick also suffers from not being able to 100% predict where your next platform will be, forcing you to take a hit no matter what. But these are just small problems in an otherwise near-flawless set of boss fights. The only part of the game I really would consider unfun to play was one of the ‘run-and-gun’ sections, featuring a heavy use of parrying to reverse gravity – it just doesn’t feel good to do, the reversing controls as you flip gravity just messed me up constantly, and it’s enemy placement is just that little bit too nasty to feel fair.
And whilst I feel the difficulty isn’t really that bad, at least on the initial ‘Regular’ difficulty, I feel that MDHR does dial up the difficulty a few notches too far. Whilst I found the final encounter against The Devil not too stressful at all, the previous fight against his lackey King Dice is borderline insane. Whilst it’s a marvel of ambition and the result is nothing short of incredible, the fight itself, consisting of a mini-game and nine different mini-boss fights, the amount of fighting you have to do to even attempt to battle King Dice (at the very least three mini-bosses), along with the chance of starting over the entire encounter (due to a mechanic in the mini-game itself) drained me of the will to keep going, to go so far and then fall at the very last moment. Additionally, I personally felt the ‘run-and-gun’ sections overall weren’t as strong as the boss fights of the game – they feel more unfair, difficulty wise, and they just feel overall less polished then the rest of the game – it absolutely shows that they were more of a late developmental decision to add them in. They serve well to break up the boss fights, but there were definitely times I sighed and decided I needed to head into one to get enough coins for a weapon, or a new charm.
One thing, that can be seen as a good or bad thing, is the game never really overstays its welcome for the average player. I’d say for the middling gamer, Cuphead will take eight to ten hours to complete its main story on Regular Difficulty, though that can vary due to how you deal with each boss fight. For the crazier people (like me), defeating The Devil unlocks Expert Mode, which tweaks boss fights to be a bit harder, with faster attacks or altered mechanics. I personally do think Expert Mode is a little bit of an overkill for not a ton of reward, but it’s a fun way to keep getting mileage out of Cuphead if you’re not ready to say goodbye to Inkwell Isles. And with a few little minor side-quests and goodies for achieving high ranks or helping Inkwell NPCs, there’s plenty to keep you sorted.
Cuphead might be the best game I’ve played this year so far, and even after finishing it a few weeks ago, I’ll still pick it up once every couple of days to work my way though some Expert fights, or working on getting A’s on every fight on Regular. It’s also the best game I’ve played in a while that I’ve just been able to chill out and relax playing, and just have genuine fun getting through. It plays well, it features a wonderful variety of challenge and boss designs, and the entire package, at least on the artistic level, is simply staggering. Cuphead is like nothing else out there on the market right now, and the Switch release has given Studio MDHR a much bigger market they really deserve. Most of all, I’m so excited to see what MDHR has for us in the future, and that the runaway success of Cuphead gives them the Cup’s off, MDHR. You’ve created a game for the ages, and one of the best games I’ve played in a very, very long time.
Retropsecitve Comments: Overall pretty happy with this review - I could've gone into more detail here or there, but considering how long I'd been writing reviews for at this point, I think this was probably my best one yet.