Before I became deeply invested in video games and started reviewing them for a living I always dreamed of becoming an animator. I’m not joking with you, in middle school I was inspired to animate by the many cartoons I watched through cable television and the talented animators I encountered online. The unique designs the artists had, the amount of personality put into each character, and the emotions they expressed through movement and visuals were mindblowing to me. I spent hours drawing fictional characters I loved into a sketch book and trying to improve my artstyle each day. Animating wasn’t really cut out for me. It’s not that my artstyle was bad, a majority of my friends seemed to like the amount of time I spent trying to add little details. It just felt like I wasn’t improving or making any progress at all. I lost motivation and eventually dropped drawing altogether. My sister on the other hand was gifted the ability to draw since childhood. She’s been drawing ever since she picked up a pencil and now even the tiniest sketch she makes turns out to look beautiful. She watches a lot of anime, so most of her work is influenced by it. Every so often she offers me tips on how to improve my artstyle and I try to use them whenever I can. Still I don’t draw as much as I used to, but once in a while I go back into my sketchbook and try to improve. Video games follow the same line when it comes to animation.
Thanks to the advancement of technology developers can implement more details or specific artstyles into their games. Better graphical textures, better lighting, more colors, etc. We have gone from polygon environments to highly detailed characters flipping all over the place with realistic face movement. That is how much video games have improved over the ages. However, not all video games need to have overly realistic environments and fully rendered characters where you can see the individual pores scattered across their soaked faces. Sometimes developers like to stick to having a unique hand drawn or cartoonish art style. Features that make their game stand out. Hand drawn games, the most time consuming games to develop. It takes a lot of time to make these types of games. To animate each individual character, backgrounds, and program them into a functioning video game. Mainly these hand drawn games are seen within the indie scene, because god knows why nobody wants to innovate and try something new. Anyways a few examples I can think of are Mark of The Ninja, Guacamelee, Ori & The Blind Forest, Darkest Dungeon, Salt and Sanctuary, and one of my favorite games of all time which I do not know how many times I have brought this statement up is Hollow Knight. Today’s game is very special. It’s one of the first independent games I ever played and the reason was for it’s art style and appeal.
Beginning development in 2010, two brothers named Chad and Jared Moldenhaurer came up with the idea of a game with hand drawn visuals highly reminiscent of cartoons seen in the 1930s. As the idea began to form in their heads, the Moldenhaurer brothers decided to make this dream come true. For the next few years they would spend day and night working on this project, literally hand drawing each character frame by frame on paper and planning out what to do next. They eventually reached out to and partnered up with Microsoft, and with a bigger staff helping with design and music their dream would soon become true. At E3 2014, the Moldenhaurer brothers revealed their new game Cuphead, a run and gun platformer inspired by cartoons from the 1930s and bullet-hell sidescrollers like Contra. Everyone was hyped up for this game, but development for Cuphead would take much longer than they thought.
In 2017 the final product was released and it lived up to what everyone expected. It was beautiful, challenging as hell, and became one of the most popular indies of 2017. Well my personal pick for indie of 2017 was Hollow Knight, but let’s not forget the amount of time and sacrifice the Moldenhaurer brothers put into Cuphead. I bought this game when it originally came out, I was in 8th grade, and I poured a ton of time into it since I had nothing else better to do. It was one of my favorite games in middle school, but it still holds up almost three years later? Coming back to Cuphead for a third playthrough I can say that it’s still pretty good, great even! I don’t think it’s a 10/10 game and there’s a couple of criticisms that could have been made during the time of its release, but it still holds up strong in a few aspects. Today we’ll be talking about why I still like Cuphead and why it deserves your attention. So chug down a big old bottle of pop and prepare to snippity-snap your way through Inkwell Isles. One snap at a time.
Story
Once upon a time there lived two brothers with cups for heads named Cuphead and Mugman, who lived together under the guidance of Elder Kettle on a peaceful three parted island named Inkwell Isle. They run, they play, and do what normal children do, but if it’s anything Elder Kettle has warned the two boys it’s not to wander too far down the aisle or else they’ll end up at the devil’s doorstep. One day Cuphead and Mugman were minding their own business until they suddenly stumbled upon the front steps towards the Devil’s Casino. I know. Kinda expected seeing how cartoons dove into dark themes with smiling faces back then. They enter the casino and within a few seconds they develop a gambling addiction. Oh wow! How unexpected! When characters send themselves down the wrong direction and this allowed cartoonists back then to teach children the wrongs of choosing demonstrated paths, otherwise sin, as they were symbolizing through the torment of these short pants mascots.
The boys are watched over by the casino’s manager King Dice who notices they are on a hot streak and possibly about to win every cent the casino has. Suddenly the owner of the casino steps in to intervene, the devil himself! Literal satan! Who would have known! As the devil is the number one signal of… I’ll shut the f*ck up now. The devil offers the boys a deal. If they can roll a pair of dice and gain a perfect six then they win all the riches in the casino. If not then the devil gets their souls. Mugman is aware of the consequences, but Cuphead being blinded by greed rolls the dice. The devil rigs the game and the boys lose their souls. They beg the devil to let them go and ask if there is any way for them to get back their souls. The devil sees potential in them and decides to send them off to hunt down a list of debtors who promised him their souls. Cuphead and Mugman scuttle back to Elder Kettle and ask him what to do. Elder Kettle, noticing the pickle they are in, gives them a magical potion that allows them to shoot magic projectiles from their fingertips and sets them off. Cuphead and Mugman are now gunning their way through the Isles, hoping to reclaim their souls. The debtors they must face are much stronger than they imagined and won’t give up their souls easily. They’ll have to try over and over again until they beat each one. Here goes!
Gameplay
Cuphead’s gameplay borrows quite a few elements from another hardcore game. Before you say “Dark Souls” in the comments of this review I’m gonna tell you to shut up and get the hell out of here if you're gonna be one of those types of people. If you haven’t watched any fun fact videos or the introduction of this review, the gameplay of Cuphead is inspired mostly by the classic run and gun sidescroller Contra, otherwise one the hardest video games ever released on the Nintendo Entertainment System. You shoot your way through levels and bosses, avoiding multiple projectiles, and if you get hit three times you die and have to start over from the beginning. No it’s not like a majority of video games where they offer checkpoints. I mean you start from the very beginning of the level. Well if you're playing with a friend you can revive each other, but who has the time to teach someone else how to play a difficult game where you feel like chucking your controller at the wall by the thirtieth attempt?
Unlike Contra which mostly consists of long levels filled with spectacle and chaos, Cuphead mostly consists of bosses each with numerous attacks and phases. You’ll have to analyze their attack pattern and equip yourself with the right weapons if you want to take each one down. However, the bosses aren’t dynamic and the way they evolve into new stages doesn’t relate to the previous one. They fit in with their themes, but each phase has entirely new attacks you must memorize. It can be frustrating and random at times which we’ll address more on in a bit, but all it takes is some practice .
Cuphead and Mugman control pretty smoothly in this game. They can move from side to side quickly, shoot in eight directions, perform special attacks depending on what firing mode they have equipped, dash to avoid enemy attacks and travel across gaps, and parry any object that is the color pink with perfect timing. Why only pink objects? Well it’s because it makes the parry system much simpler. You just gotta shoot the boss until they are dead and a successful attempt should take around less than five minutes. Remember though that it takes numerous attempts until you finally nail a boss down. If you die you are shown a screen of how far you got, and the parts when the boss changes attack phases. It’s nice depending on how you view it, because the bar can showcase that if the player tries harder they can get closer to success. I may have died midway through the fight, but at least I know I made it midway through this time and that I can probably get farther the next time through.
Besides the thirty or so bosses in this game there are also run and gun levels. There are only like six of them and their themes and design consistency are all over the place, but they're pretty long and they have golden coins scattered within them. Golden coins allow you to purchase new weapons and upgrades from a vendor named Porkrind who is at one specific location in each world. Most of these items are pretty useful. A spread shot that’s powerful up close and eats away at enemy health, homing projectiles that do half damage but don’t require you to aim, an extra hit point or two, a boomerang shot which is a much better version of the basic projectile, or a charm that allows you to dash through objects without taking damage. Equipping the right charms and perks can make a difficult fight or level a tad bit easier, so do switch it up now and again.
Besides that there isn't much else I can say about Cuphead. The game is simple and between this and Contra in my opinion I would rather prefer Cuphead, because it’s not cluttered to the brim with chaos and finds a way to enlighten the player in this challenging experience.. Hopefully you can reclaim your souls from the devil.
Thoughts
Cuphead is still a really good game. It’s charming, filled with personality, and is worth playing both by yourself and with a friend. I do recommend playing it by yourself though, because it’s much easier to keep track of what is going on screen and having a second player may make the fun time shoot downs harder to keep track of. The visuals and art style are stunning as you expected. Fluid and not a single bit of lag or cut corners with the animation. I love this art style, because it pays respect to the cartoons that helped make the animation industry what it is today. The soundtrack hits just the right beats, jazzy and always finding a way to keep the player uplifted and engaged during a frenetic fight. Even if they are on the twentieth attempt.
Gameplay is pretty good. The game is hard since it’s a bullet hell, but you’ll eventually pick up on it. Each failed attempt has a list of mistakes to learn from, you’ll improve, make it farther, die again, and reattempt the fight until you achieve the victory you wanted so badly. I think bullet hells are games that rely a lot of attention and being able to maneuver the character without having to look at where they are so much. You’ll enter that rhythm where even if a bunch of projectiles fly through the screen you will magically wave around them like a bird flying through a storm of snow. The controls are tight with Cuphead and Mugman snapping towards the direction I want them to move or aim their finger guns. The bosses are fun to fight with only a small handful of them feeling frustrated. The dragon fight is still frustrating, but equip the boomerang during the second phase and it should be good. I swear that pirate fight has more health than it really should! Then there's King Dice where you have to be very good at parrying, but the fight itself isn't that hard and by then you should have mastered parrying.
The run and gun levels offer a little bit of down time from the boss stages, but I do wish there were more of them. However, this would have required MDHR Studios to animate more backgrounds and enemies which would have dragged the development time out even longer. There’s a nice variety of weapons and perks to equip, and the game does a decent job at getting you to try out each one just to see what they do.
Cuphead is rewarding enough to keep you moving forward and it is mostly well designed, but even though I like this game there are problems I have with it. That’s right, the criticism is about to come into play. Since this is a bullet hell game there are the occasional random moments where the game goes from being tough but fair to throwing random stuff, because this game has a really bad RNG system. The genie and blimp fights have specific points where they’ll transform into one of three stages, and the way you tell which one they are going to transform into is completely random as the transition animation is the same for all three. I know Cuphead has lovely visuals and MDHR Studios spent a lot of time animating every frame and panel, but have some consistency with the hitboxes. I do also wish not so many attacks, especially during fights that require you to fly a plane, aren’t just filling the screen with bullets. It just becomes more frustrating and reinforces the idea of transforming from tough but fair to randomness is the main factor that carries you forward unfortunately.
Compare this to Furi, a bullet hell game that is more focused on quick reaction but it’s because the bosses won’t mainly rely on ranged combat. Your opponents' attacks are clearly telegraphed, there are ways to break up projectiles, and projectiles glow a bright neon color to not blend in with the background. Not the best comparison though, because one of them is a third person action game and the other is a 2D side scroller. The game offers difficulty settings before a fight begins, but the only way to progress is by beating bosses on the normal setting. So why offer the player the option to do it on the easy setting? Probably to get used to a boss’ attack or offer some practice.
Final complaint is that the game is short, roughly around five to seven hours long, but that is expected since this is mainly a boss rush game. Don’t expect tons of content. I can complain this is a game that chooses style over substance which is a phrase used a lot by critics, but this is a game that prioritizes itself off of it’s art style. Besides that I can safely say I still recommend Cuphead. It’s the easiest bullet hell I know, it doesn’t overstay its welcome, and the cartoonish visuals are enough to put a smile on your face. In the end I am going to give Cuphead a 9/10 for excellence at best.
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