#fromlateoctober

Cuphead, for me, was one of the first games in years which immediately brought me back to my childhood. Yeah, okay, I’ll explain. Its difficulty is fast and demanding. The game doesn’t hold back on the player, but instead provides the routines, elements, and boss attacks, and asks you to: watch, play, and learn.

A game as difficult as this is not something I typically gravitate to - I lack the patience and resolve. But Cuphead gave me just enough that I felt compelled, round after round, to try “just one more time”.

I don’t think I had really tackled a challenge like this since I was a kid. I hadn’t dug my heels in the ground, wiped my palms on my jeans, and resolved myself to just. do. this. Since... who knows? This game made that feeling a beautiful necessity that I was happy to indulge. 

And this does little to acknowledge the art direction of the game. It undoubtedly reigns King of the castle, if for no other fact that its meticulously hand-drawn animation (directly influenced by 1930′s era cartoons) brings to mind terms like, “zany!”, “wowza!”, “bombastic!”. By today’s standards, it’s pretty common to hear “holy shit - what am I looking at and how is it even possible?!”. Every frame, environment, scene, and boss, has been rendered with such detail and seeming intimate familiarity of its inspiration that it’s hard not to qualify the art direction as flawlessly executed.

The same argument could be made for its gameplay. Cuphead, from head to toe, contains tight controls coupled with smart and challenging rhythms for each boss. It’s a quick and contained mode of gameplay which seems to meld into your brain the more you play. So much so, that while playing co-op, I’d often look down at the controller and have to consciously unstick my thumb, still smashed into the ‘shoot’ button, because, well, I had been dead for 30 seconds or more.

I did find the jumble of chaos to be too much at times, made worse by the fact that Cuphead and his cohort, Mugman, look so damn similar that I’d sometimes confuse them onscreen. However, any setback in difficulty I ultimately contributed to the fact that I just needed to play more. This always made the game seem fair, and heightened my sense of accomplishment when I defeated a level.

Cuphead, as an understatement, is a mighty fine looking game. It’s hard to do it true justice with words because it begs to be experienced in order to appreciate all that it has to offer. From music to art to gameplay, it is the complete package, one which I am keen to enthusiastically share with others.

This doesn’t even take into account that my entire experience of the game was played couch co-op with my sister. This probably transported me back to my childhood more than anything. As we played, we’d coordinate our moves on the screen and talk each other through the challenge, we’d tell each other whether or not we planned to parry, and, if we noticed an enemy was transitioning to its next stage.

We’d scream, and yell at the screen as things became progressively more chaotic. Together, we’d unpeel our hands from the controller and take a deep breath between levels (ahem, deaths). I hadn’t experienced something so tense or exhilarating since the mine cart level in Donkey Kong Country, or, just about anything involving a pissed-off animal in Tomb Raider on PS1.