Back in 2017, around when the game first came out, I was a Junior in High School. I remember watching YouTube videos on all the bosses in the game while I was in my computer class and thinking it looked awesome. Only problem is, I didn't own an Xbox (and still don't). Fast forward to 2019, the game comes out on the Switch and I buy it. Now I rarely buy digital games but I figured it was a big game I've always wanted to play and that it might not get a physical for a while, so I purchased it. Me and my girlfriend at the time played it for a bit and I myself got up to Grimm Matchstick but eventually dropped it. Fast forward again to 2022, on a whim I decide I want to play it again. I restarted the game and went and beat it for the first time finally. I thought it was really awesome! Once I heard they were coming out with a physical copy, and with the DLC included..I knew I had to buy it again. And that's what I did, so I decided to replay it once again. Not only did I beat it again, I beat every boss with an A- or higher and not only that, I beat every boss on expert difficulty and got the platinum trophy!

I'm just gonna start with the absolute best aspect of the game. You all know what it is, the presentation and art style. It's the main reason this game is loved, it's immaculate. The attention to detail in replicating old rubber hose cartoons is just amazing. The game is just pure eye candy and it's wonderful. This game will always hold the test of time because of this one aspect alone...but luckily there are other great aspects about the game as well.

Accompanying the amazing artstyle is the soundtrack. Now, it may not be an OST I'd listen to a ton outside of the game but wow it's a treat. It's upbeat, it's jazzy, and it's all orchestrated. It just makes the game feel more grand and way more authentic in it's homage to the time period these cartoons came from. My personal favorite songs would have to be the the Isle Three theme, Murine Corps and Floral Fury. The Isle three theme especially is my standout favorite. Idk man it's sooo jazzy I love it.

Now were onto the real meat and potatoes, the gameplay. It's a run and gun shooter and it's pretty simple. You have your normal attacks, your special move, your maxed out special, a dodge and a parry. Pretty simple move set but it works well with how chaotic the game can be. You can choose from several different normal attacks, special moves and charms. Charms just give you an extra ability. For most of the game I just had the charge shot and crackshot, the 1st special and the smoke bomb charm. I feel like a ton of people love the charge shot and smoke bomb especially since I've seen a ton of people have those in their arsenal.

What levels do you use these moves on? Let's start with the run and gun stages. They're alright! They are not the main focus of the game, and apparently were only added because of fan outcry but they're decent overall. If the game was just composed of these, it probably wouldn't be nearly as well liked as it is cuz people seem to not really dig these stages. Which I can see, they are definitely the weakest part of the game I think. However, they aren't the main focus of the game. Those would be the bosses.

The bosses on the other hand are awesome. These were gonna be the main and only focus of the game and it makes sense. They're pretty much all well done and a lot of fun to go against. Here's where the visuals are at their peak too because one of the most fun things is to just see all the different boss animations. This is why I wanted to play this game so bad back in 2017, the bosses are a sight the behold. This is also why I'm so excited for the DLC because I've barely seen any of it as of now so I'm ecstatic to see all the new animations contained in it. Anyways back to the bosses, like I said they're awesome. Some of my favorites were Captain Brineybeard, Werner Werman and Sally Stageplay. I guess I just really like Isle three lol. There were also some very brutal bosses. Back in 2019, Bippi the Clown gave me the hardest time and he was still tough nowadays. Dr. Kahl's robot can be brutal for newcomers and he gave me a hard time. However, the hardest for me still was the devil. I dont think I died quite as many times as I did back in 2022, but it wasn't far off. However in expert mode, he was absolutely ridiculous. Expert mode in general could be really crazy, mostly the plane bosses, but the devil was on another level at least for me. Either way, I beat em all and got the platinum in the end which I still can't believe. Never doing expert mode again lol. Also never ever doing the one pacifist trophy again fuck that one.

Glad I replayed this again cuz it was still an amazing time, even if going for the platinum made me lose my sanity at points lol. Definitely one of my favorite indie games now. Can't wait to dive into The Delicious Last Course!

I remember this game being one of the few reasons I wanted an Xbox One back when this was announced. Nearly 10 years later, with all of the game's content finally being released I can safely say this is one of the greatest games ever made. The game's difficulty is perfect since it will require you to learn how to use the weapons and adjust to the bosses' strategies in order to win. Charge & Crack Shot are a bit overpowered but even with them the game still retains a level of challenge. The animation is extremely consistent and absolutely beautiful. It feels like you're literally playing a 1930's rubberhose cartoon. The side-scrolling stages are my least favorite part of the game, but they're still decent and give the game a little extra longevity. I don't give out perfect 10s lightly but this game absolutely deserves it. PLAY THIS GAME!

I don't think there has ever been a game that made me as frustrated as Cuphead but at the same time made me come back for more over and over. Boss battles often tipped their toes into annoying/frustrating territory without ever feeling unfair (no matter how many times I yelled "This is some unfair bs"). It's the type of game that I would think about all the time and when I wasn't playing it, I was craving to fight the next boss. I do wish there was something more to do between said bosses, but that's more of a personal preference and I'm not sure if it would've made the game better in the end.

Great game that overflows with care and passion from the devs but made me a bit too frustrated at times to truly love it.

Outspoken homages in video games have a tendency to be a surface-level reading of the source material, and the degree of authenticity that Cuphead commits to is the exception that proves this rule. Not only does it completely capture the look, sound, and overall sense of humor of rubberhose, but I was completely blown away by the attention to detail that's present here. The level entrances purposefully look like they're part of cels and not the painted overworld. Djimmi the Great's stage uses a miniature instead of a hand-drawn background. The audio for voices is so low in quality that every character sounds threatening. The title screen is ominous and drawn in a more realistic style than the rest of the game. I'm sure I missed tons of other little things that only animation aficionados would be able to pick up on, but the best part is that the style completely works in favor of the boss fight format. Most bosses that follow the multiple phase formula don't really have a good reason to do so, but Cuphead has the perfect reason: embracing the 1930s mentality of just having a desire to experiment and show off cool animation. The transformations that every boss goes through when transitioning through phases make it so that each one is its own little story, which is a great motivator to push forward and more than justifies the game's difficulty. The graphic that shows your level progress after you die supplements the feeling of getting a tiny bit further towards your goal each try, and of course all of these efforts would've been completely wasted if the character designs weren't as excellent as they are.

As for the bosses themselves, it feels like the goal is to outlast them rather than to defeat them, since you almost always deal damage constantly throughout every fight. The only skill you really learn over the course of the game is keeping track of an increasing number of hazards at once, which I'd say works in the game's favor since every object is cleverly contextualized (and nice to look at, of course), but I definitely wish there was more to it. There's something to be said for the straightforward simplicity that the gameplay embraces, especially when the visuals are anything but simple, but it would've been great if there was some strategy besides shooting until you fill your meter and then using your super. The different weapons feel like self-explanatory tools rather than ways to expand the gameplay- use the chaser when there's a phase where the boss has little health but is hard to hit, use the spread when a boss is stationary and possible to get close to. The nonexistent feedback also discourages experimentation, as there's no real way to tell how much more damage one move does compared to another and you just have to take the game's word for it when it tells you something's strong. I've been critical of the lack of mechanical depth, but that's probably because it's the only area that doesn't match the ambition of the rest of the game. The Moldenhauer brothers absolutely deserve all the praise in the world for putting together something this inspired, this passionate, and it makes me unbelievably happy that they've found success. BRAVO!

Replayed this before starting the DLC and I feel like I didn't give this game enough credit for how well it nailed the 30s cartoon feel. Everyone talks about the animation, and for good reason; it's incredible. But everything from the character designs featuring bizarre creatures and inanimate objects with faces to the references to alcohol, smoking, and demons that were much more commonplace back in the day, this straight up feels like they ripped an actual cartoon from the 30s and just made a game about it. It's 100% original though so it's just that much cooler that they really made these characters feel right at home.

I definitely noticed some of the bosses were way easier than I thought they were on my first run back in 2018 but most are pretty fairly balanced and well-designed. The Phantom Express, Cagney Carnation, and the Devil himself are my favorite fights from the game. Levels are also better than I gave them credit for and featured their own interesting scenarios but they're very straightforward with very little to go out of your way for and just pale in comparison to the bosses. Banger game though, now onto the DLC 🔥

Great animation and a lot of boss fights don't make a great game. If you've played the Contras, the Mega Mans, the Metal Slugs, and TurboGrafx-16 shooters, you've seen most of what Cuphead has to offer, including its supposedly high difficulty (as commemorated by the adolescent, predictable outrage over Dean Takahashi's gee-whiz ineptitude: https://venturebeat.com/games/cuphead-hands-on-my-26-minutes-of-shame-with-an-old-time-cartoon-game/).

Despite the absence of a compelling array of power-ups, Cuphead is not that hard. Unlike the truly uncompromising shooters (Contra IV, Mega Man, Super Star Soldier, R-Type, and so on), Cuphead throws pieces of a game at its audience: you don't have to fight through a level to get the opportunity to lock horns with a boss. Instead, you move an avatar on a world map, which provides instant access to the bosses. If you're even halfway familiar with classic shooters, most of these battles will not be intimidating; more than a few will be quite boring due to their plagiarism. And inexperienced gamers can simply "get good" without the inconvenience of having to learn levels or any potential complexities of an upgrade system.

It's more than clear that Studio MDHR has a superficial appreciation for shooters and intended to score a trendy indie hit by overcompensating with admittedly impressive hand-drawn animation. The actual levels in Cuphead are pathetic at best: short, obvious, undramatic, phoned-in, an insulting waste of time. And the horizontally scrolling battles feel like lukewarm ideas that would have been rejected by the makers of groundbreaking fare like Gradius, Life Force, and Lords of Thunder. I could only imagine liking Cuphead if I were ignorant of video game history and the mechanical possibilities of the art form.

Espero nunca mais passar por uma experiência dessas na minha vida, mas enfim.
Cuphead tem uma arte ABSURDA, você está jogando um desenho dos anos 30.
Mas oque mais me chama atenção, é sua trilha sonora que fica Impregnada na sua cabeça de tão bem compostas.
Cada boss é muito marcante, principalmente aqueles que te faz querer arrancar os cabelos.
O desafio é grande mas muito envolvente.

it feels somewhat rare that an indie game really captures a retro style in a way that does more than pay lip-service to its predecessors. shovel knight was one of those games: a pitch-perfect recreation of NES-style action challenges stripped away of the mechanical uncertainty of the actual games of that era. cuphead captures that for the run-and-gun in a way that makes it not only a loving tribute but a legitimate cornerstone in the genre.

cuphead feels borne by a rigorous design methodology that demonstrates a deep understanding of the fundamentals of boss design in a 2D space. each fight is undergirded by the movement and platform features; this is generally the unifying trait. plenty of fights take place on a featureless flat ground, but very quickly wrinkles such as scrolling, conveyors, limited platforms, or combinations of these are introduced. a great late-game example is the ghost train stage that features of a platform that can and must be moved between left, center, and right using parry controls. these establish for the player the laws of their dominion so to speak: what space can the player leverage? what options exist at any given time to dodge a certain obstacle?

with each phase then comes the primary attack. bosses generally lack dynamic reactive capabilities unlike a human, so they are incapable of mindgames generally speaking. thus, in virtually all boss fights the boss cycles between random attacks that the player must apply a counterstrategy against. in modern games the design parlance is as such: windup animation begets the attack proper begets an opening for a player to either 1) rest if their counterstrategy is not efficient enough to yield a counterattack or 2) counterattack. too unthreatening and the player barely needs to muster a counterattack, and too overpowered and the player will have no time to respond. cuphead weaves in a truly surprising variety of primaries to challenge the player: the enemy may momentarily remove the player's control of the space, such as with the cat at the end of the rat tank fight batting its paws to swat the right and left sides of the screen, or perhaps the enemy creates antagonistic autonomous elements that force the player to utilize their spatial reasoning and pattern recognition to deduce a projectile's movement habits and shift their position accordingly, such as in the bee queen's middle phase where she incorporates stochaistically-drifting geometric projectiles as well as bullets that move in a linear back-and-forth climb on either side of the screen.

primary attacks on their own are only a lock-and-key design principle: find the counterstrategy that works against a particular move and apply it when needed. what creates true tension in the fight are the auxillary attacks. virtually all bosses are able to separately cycle through auxillary attacks that generally involve an entirely separate on-screen entity attacking on their own accord out of sync with the primary opponent. auxillary attacks on their own already heighten the experience by creating a space-constraint intersection that forces the player to adapt their key to more than just a single lock. certain intersections of attacks may prevent successful counterattacks or force the player to fall back on safer strategies, thus making the risk-and-reward judgment more critical and ever mutating. where cuphead really succeeds is having the auxillary attacks cycle as well. it's much like having three basic collared shirts and three basic ties: the combinations they present give you nine outfits, yielding an multiplicative amount of potential attack intersections. phase one of the sea medusa fight is a great example of this: three primary attacks (either summoning ghost projectiles or bringing one of two different fish out of the water with their own projectiles) with three auxillary attacks (staggered puffer fish projectiles, a water jet that forces a positive y velocity, and bombs that explode with a octagonal bullet pattern). each on their own is manageable, but combined there is an additional level of fluidity demanded of the player with adapting on the fly to intersections they may have never seen before.

of course cuphead doesn't simply hew to these elements in every fight; it expands on them and plays with the potential they possess. take the pirate ship fight: this begins with both a small primary attack (pellets fired by the captain one by one) with an auxillary component (a barrel that moves back and forth at the top of the screen, attempting to crush the player when they pass underneath). within time the captain will begin preempting his own pellet attack with a cycle of attacks from different sources, each with their own tell: a shark that consumes the left half of the screen, small bulldog fish(?) that slide across the ground, and a squid that both creates a fountain of bullets and can turn the screen dark if not defeated in time. on its own this is a perfectly interesting fight: manage the primary and auxillary attacks while being cognizant of primary attacks from external components via tells. however, in the second phase, the ship itself begins shooting cannonballs on a timer. at this point the player must not only manage transient attacks from the captain but also track the separate rhythms of the barrel and the ship's cannonballs. these intersect in a truly polyrhythmic fashion that pushes the fight into truly challenging territory that feels immensely rewarding to lock in with.

this is also boosted by cuphead having a stellar kit and smooth controls that feel sharp without being too abrupt or linear. his ability to parry specific objects (which are colored pink to distinguish them) adds a scale of mastery of many bullet patterns, with basic familiarity only yielding the ability to dodge while a complete understanding allows navigation to specific bullets for a parry and the reward of extra super meter. the super meter attacks are all rather useful and feel well balanced, though for the full-meter arts I can't really imagine someone using anything other than invincibility. however, I found myself legitimately switching out his shots and charms for different fights, which is not to say I found all of the variety useful (I mainly stuck to chaser and spread along with the smoke dodge and one extra heart depending on the fight), but to require a level of specificity in strategy for each fight encourages me to experiment more than I may otherwise. there are virtually no points of frustration I can attribute to a failure in the controls or a lack of a specific tool; almost every time I was stumped on a particular counterstrategy I always eventually worked something out even if it wasn't optimal.

I would really go as far as to say I don't think cuphead has any particular failings or even elements of unfair frustration that I can think of. while an immensely challenging experience, the primary and auxillary attacks are synergistic in such a way that a given intersection can't truly render an attack undodgeable or debilitating. never did I feel like a particular portion was just inserted because it felt cool or to fill space; rather, every bit of the game feels handled with care and finesse. the dragon fight was the peak of this for me... that particular fight walled me and put me off the game quite a bit. while the exasperation I felt was valid, I could never pinpoint a particular aspect that really felt unfair to me. at the end of the day, those projectiles that explode into smaller projectiles when hit really preyed on my spray-and-pray instincts in a way that punished me (and many others I assume) far more than most games are willing to muster. if I had to name one little thing that did feel off to me, it was the platforms during the bee queen fight. the scrolling part and random gaps don't bother me, but their collision box doesn't feel quite lined up with the art, which sometimes led to me falling randomly in confusing ways.

I do wish the flying stages had the same level of customization as the ground stages, but understandably that's a scope issue and not something I would expect from a small production. the non-boss levels also feel a bit perfunctory, but they are all still fun and only necessary for collecting coins for purchasing items in the shop. both of these won't get in the way of anyone looking to experience this: the core of the gameplay is still the tremendous boss fights. this has given me a a nice little kick in the pants to go back and dive into the early 16-bit fundamental works that helped mold this into the genius showpiece that it is.

when i first saw the dragon i was like OMG WHOS A GOOD BOY YOURE SO CUTE AND ADORABLE AND cries now after 99+ attempts at beating that piece of shit the mere sight of it gives me some very nasty and traumatic war flashbacks which is very weird for my experience with this game since i beat a couple of bosses first try and i actually think The Devil™ took me less attempts but anyway what do i know i suck at this game and it was a blast nonetheless

by the way in italian the devil is called satanasso which isnt a word per se but is composed by satana + asso which respectively mean satan and ace in italian because... yknow the whole casino gambling cards aesthetic the italian translation team deserves a very long kiss on the lips

I loved retro cartoons as a kid, we had all these compilations on DVD of different cartoons from the 30s and 40s, Popeye the Sailor, Felix the Cat, Owl Jolson, etc. So right away the look of this game evokes a lot of that nostalgia, recreating that style with such an insane amount of detail. The actual game itself is polished to a sheen as well, it’s one of those games where a boss starts out impossible, but you keep getting better and better until it practically becomes autopilotable. And these bosses, they’re all so imaginative and feel right out of the cartoons that inspired them. I don’t really have a whole lot to complain about here, besides my absolute contempt for the Pirate boss.

It was also really funny watching this game singlehandedly destroy every gaming outlet’s integrity.

I was randomly talking about Cuphead with a couple of my friends and remembered that I never completed it so I decided to finally finish it for good. I got the game in late 2020 and played through everything before getting stuck on King Dice around mid 2021 and shelving it for a while. I tried a couple times to try and beat it but gave up until today when I finally managed to beat King Dice and the devil. So i figured I would log it as I technically beat it despite playing most of it years ago.

Cuphead is up there with some of the best Indie games of all time with its incredibly unique art style and creative boss fights. The main attraction is of course the boss fights who all feel really unique and challenging Challenging might be a bit of an understatement actually as this game is actually really hard at time with certain boss fights like King Dice, Grim Matchsticks and Beppi the Clown being some standouts in the difficulty area. Whether its due to the flurry of attacks or the sheer amount of stuff on screen, most of the bosses will slap you around the first few times you try. Despite all that, none of the bosses feel impossible as attack patterns can be learned with enough attempts and after death seeing the progress bar serves as a good motivator to get back in there and finish it off. There are two main types of fights, regular ones and plane fights. The plane fights are quite fun but serve as some of the most challenging fights due to the bullet hell type attacks you have to dodge. There are also 6 run and gun stages which are ok, im not a huge fan of them as they feel quite rushed.

Your attacks can be upgraded using coins obtained from the run and gun stages. These coins can by weapon types and charms to help you. Some are way better than others and you only really need to buy the ones that you are going to use as switching between them isn't really necessary. I personally used the Charge shot type and the Spread shot type alongside the smoke bomb charm as it is insanely OP.

I can't praise this game enough for its visuals and score. Cuphead takes heavy inspiration from the 1920's cartoon animation style called "Rubber Hose". Each stage has a hand draw backdrop that changes when the boss phases change. Each boss looks like something straight out of an old Disney cartoon, alongside Cuphead himself. Each stage is so satisfying to look at I sometimes found myself getting hit as I was too distracted looking at the cool details in the backdrops and boss designs. The score is also phenomenal, every track is a banger. The boss fights go so well with there chosen music its unbelievable. Studio MDHR knocked it out of the park with both visuals and music.

My only complaint about this game is on some bosses the RNG is a bit dodgy. Mostly with the amount of stuff on screen at once, sometimes there is no way to dodge without getting hit. I noticed it particularly while fighting the devil where I would be forced to one side to dodge an attack but have one of the purple demons come from that side and hit me before I can react. Might be a skill issue but I remember some bosses like Grim Matchsticks and Baroness Von BonBon being very RNG orientated and making them more difficult in turn.

Cuphead is one of my favourite Indie games of all time. Its one of the only "hard games" that I have ever been any good at so beating it finally feels like a bit accomplishment lol. I'm currently playing the DLC and will review that once its completed. 100% worth playing.

If someone says video games can't be art, show them this.

I won't shake any conventions by saying this, but Cuphead is gorgeous. So many animations, so much creativity, and countless references to classic cartoons; I love how this game pays homage to so much classic animation without ever feeling derivative, each beast the game creates still feels like its own thing. The game boasts excellent weapon variety and a near-perfect upward turn in both difficulty and quality as the adventure goes on. Sadly, I found Cuphead's core gameplay just basic and repetitive enough to hold the game back from a perfect score, but I'm still giving it five stars in the artwork department: All these same feelings apply to the DLC.

At one point, King Dice addresses you and says, "You mugs." I can't not love this game.

Cuphead is getting a lot of well deserved attention again since The Delicious Last course came out. I myself jumped on the bandwagon as well after initially dropping the game last year, finding new respect and admiration, as well as a clean new outlook on it. I'll be reviewing the base game, and the DLC for this one.

Cuphead and his pal Mugman like to roll the dice, to the point of Cuphead mindlessly gambling their souls for one last dice roll against The Devil himself. A single toss decided their fate, and then came immediate realization and regret. Cuphead and Mugman beg to substitute the cost any way they can, the Devil accepts their offer by having them go all across Inkwell Isle to collect the long overdue contracts of many different citizens of all different shapes and sizes. Booted out of the casino, Cuphead and Mugman run to find the elder Kettle to help them hopefully fix this mess. The story itself is fun and helps create some sort of narrative for why you're fighting all these crazy bosses throughout the game, but there's not much else to it. I think the simplicity is fine, since it gives you everything you need.

The gameplay of Cuphead is simple, you move around, jump, and shoot by holding down a button. you have parries to help you gain height off of certain attacks and projectiles, and helps you build up a meter that can be spent to supercharge your moves, or use a full meter to perform a super powerful special move. You also have a dash to help avoid longer attacks, reposition, and go over large gaps. The complexity with Cuphead is the fights themselves, you'll be fighting a very unique and colorful cast of different characters, each having their own unique gimmicks, attack patterns, and even stage layouts to figure out and brawl in.

Cuphead is not easy, it's very deceptive in the difficulty, most players will be able to cream the first two or three bosses, and the first run and gun stage with ease. Doesn't take long for Cuphead to stop messing around and really starts to test you, the game expects you to gain a good grasp on everything you're capable of quick, thankfully the first handful of bosses are designed in a genius manner. The first boss you'll come across teaches you about boss placements, how some will be idle on the other side of you, others will be in the middle of the screen, where you'll have limited space to weave dodges and attacks, and finally the last one teaches you some bosses will be in the background, giving you lots of space to move around, and plenty of angles to attack from, the most important though is no contact damage for these particular fights. The next boss will teach you how to use your dash to get out of a tricky spot. These are just the first two examples, but Cuphead is very good at letting players naturally figure things out through easy examples early on, which leads to even faster mastery, which is very satisfying and keeps you engaged and wanting to play more to see how much further they'll push these mechanics. Which they definitely do, I think the game keeps a consistent spike in difficulty for the amount of skill you'll have at that point in the game. I do feel some run and gun levels can get a bit crazy, and I'm not a huge fan personally of the run and gun levels for another reason. Cuphead is a game about awareness, and studying your enemies moves and tells. Run and gun levels usually have some sort of "random" aspect to it that makes the consistency a bit worse. Nothing that you can't react to on the fly, but I got stuck a bit more than I should have on some of these levels, overall though, it's fine, and they are totally optional to do. They are the primary source for coins, which is the currency in this game to buy new weapons and upgrades for Cuphead and/or Mugman, so I recommend doing a few of them at least. Overall, the game has very snappy combat and movement (pun intended) and has a very satisfying difficulty curve later that can get a bit hectic at times. Especially later there can be a lot going on and it can get a bit confusing, but it never got bad to the point where I got distracted, I always felt in control and felt capable of avoiding attacks and beating whatever was thrown at me.

You can't talk about Cuphead without talking about the presentation. What an absolutely stunning marvel at how far games have come. Being able to take hand-drawn animations, putting them into a game, and turning it into a game, that is fully interactive, such a spectacle. The game looks perfect, captures the 1930's aesthetic perfectly, everything is so smoothly animated and has so much style and personality. The filter put over the game puts a grin on my face every time, and don't get me started on the voice lines, it really feels like they bundled up everything great about 1930's cartoons and put it all into this awesome, small package. There's even a lot here you probably wouldn't see from the 1930's. or in a cartoon, but that just goes to show how well they understand the style. The best part to me though, is the not so subtle disturbing aspect they put into these designs and their equally morbid transformations at times. Taking full advantage of the medium the game was originally created in, the creativity oozes everywhere here, and I was laughing or in shock every time this happened, brilliant work.

To truly enjoy Cuphead, you must acquire a taste for free-form jazz. Once again just completely going all in on making this game feel like a love letter to the 1930's, everyone knows the Cuphead soundtrack. Every song is a joy to listen to, every song fits the accompanying boss or area almost too well. I honestly can't think of a more fitting genre for Cuphead. Even if you don't like video games, as a musician, Cuphead is astonishing, the craft put into these live tracks with real instruments will always have my highest respect for the effort and just how you can tell everyone was having fun making this music, and that's really important.

Now, I haven't gone into the DLC yet, so I will now. Considering the price for the DLC, the highest quality animations I've seen in a while, the same amazing style of music, with a bit more variety thrown in this time being infused with the jazz was a nice surprise and was really magical. Probably one of the best DLC's in a game in a long time, absolutely worth every penny, I immensely enjoyed my time with Delicious Last Course. Not only are you getting more stuff to do, you even get a brand new character you can play the entire game again with, and it's an entirely new and amazing experience. Kudos to Studio MDHR for the amount of love, time, and care put into this entire game, and the DLC.

Cuphead will remain in my thoughts for a long time. I originally dropped it back in 2021 because I thought the game was just okay and not anything special. I'm so glad I gave it another shot after seeing a bit from the new DLC, because this was absolutely a phenomenal experience, and will love to revisit again in a few years time. The game is pretty short, I was able to finish the base game and DLC in two sessions of about two hours and twenty-five minutes each, but that's the perfect length for a game like this in my opinion. Absolutely give this game a chance if the DLC interested you like it did for me. You can get cuphead on the Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Playstation 4, Windows PC, and Mac.

(7-year-old's review, typed by her dad)

It's hard. One million exclamation points! I liked how there was alive veggies. Let me type.

booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

gorgeous looking boss rush/run and gun game where the gameplay is challenging yet rewarding, the OST slaps, and calling it a visual treat is an understatement. The bosses are all very challenging multiphased obstacles that will definitely kill you on the first run, and with every death showing how far you progressed in the fight, the game becomes one of optimizing each run to eventually scrape out a W. I think this parallels the struggles of clearing and optimizing runs to beat retro games, except done with 3-minute long bosses rather than 3-hour long games. For this game to have those kinds of feelings in it while staying modern and digestible WHILE ALSO looking and sounding so good, it's no wonder why this game became such a phenomena.

I am a cuphead fr

This game is pretty damn excellent, it's got one of the greatest art styles you'll ever see in a video game and some very well-crafted boss-fights, I recommend this for anyone well-versed in 2D platformers.

Truthfully this stuff is not as hard as people say, sure there were some difficult and annoying bosses, but it's all manageable and easy to figure out. With pretty basic pattern recognition and some quickness you'll be able to beat it.

Now, the reason for this being a 4 star is that the run & gun levels are honestly just not that good! They lack flow, feel tedious, and aren't satisfying to beat the same way a boss fight is. Enemy placement is also random which is lame. Personally, I would've just had solely boss fights than these filler levels, cause they just aren't that fun!

As for the Boss fights, some got on my nerves but the only one that really annoyed me was the Dicehead guy right before you fight the Devil. It's like they tried to design the most time-wasting boss imaginable, just more repetitive than anything because you have to go through a gauntlet over and over and over, this repetition reminds me of some NES games, but it's simply not my bag baby yeah.

Abilities are also kinda off, I literally just stuck with the same handful of abilities I got at the beginning of the game because nothing else in the store was better, just unsure what the design idea was there.

Other than these three complaints though, this is a very very good platformer, with beautiful art, tight controls, and engaging fights, Cuphead is an easy recommendation, and hopefully so is the DLC, we shall see soon.