When Microsoft showed a brief clip of Cuphead during the ID@XBOX montage at E3 2014, I lost my mind. The look of it was so fresh, so unlike anything I had seen in games up until that point, and I had to know more.
The developers have talked about how they really wanted to capture the look and feel of a 1920’s cartoon, and I’ll be damned if they didn’t do just that. Playing Cuphead legitimately feels like you’re controlling a Max Fleischer cartoon. The attention to detail in the design is astonishing. From the design of characters and animations, to the overwhelming (in a good way!) ragtime music that is pumping out the speakers at any given time, to the weird visual quality and flicker of vintage projection equipment, everything about the game just feels so right.
Given how captivated everyone is by the look of Cuphead, I really don’t think that most people who pick it up their first time will expect it to be as incredibly difficult as it is. While that 1920’s nickelodeon cartoon style is the basis for the game’s visuals, the gameplay inspirations are drawn right from the likes of Contra, Gunstar Heroes and other frantic shooters of the era.
What I played was a selection of the game’s boss battles. Myself and another player spent a good fifteen minutes taking on a bird crammed into a birdhouse and a angry pirate. Even the boss designs have the same excruciating attention to detail. For example, it was noted that the pirate would flip up his eye patch every 71 frames or so, a detail I missed due to my frantic efforts not to die.
I do admit that for the first half of the demo I was playing it wrong. I hopped in as I would any other 2D shooter, and I just started jumping around and firing at enemies, and dying over and over again. It took me a while to realize that any pink object can be parried by hitting the jump button again while in mid-air just as you make contact with it. By parrying the object, you destroy it and start to fill a special meter, which allows you to unleash a devastating super move. Parrying and building up that meter is still extremely difficult though, so don’t expect to rely on it too much.
You’re going to die. You’re going to die a lot. But as you die, you figure out all of the little quirks of the level and get incrementally better at every run. It sounds reductive, for sure, but after dying time and time again, finally getting the rhythm down and blasting through the level is extremely satisfying. It certainly helps that the game’s controls are very tight, so every time I died I knew it was a failing on my part, rather than the game being unfair.
My only real complaint about Cuphead is that it isn’t coming until 2016, but the developers have stated that they are aiming for a release closer to the beginning of the year.
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