The hardest and the loveliest game ever made? Chris Capel learns not to play with others

Since being announced in 2010 Cuphead has received a lot of attention, mostly because of its gorgeous 1930s Max Fleischer-esque animation style. However it has also become notable for taking ages - it was well received at the last three E3 shows and still isn’t due until 2016. It’s hard to say what’s taking so long other than sheer polish from the relatively tiny team at Studio MDHR (catchy name, guys). Still, it’s finally been confirmed as coming out on PC alongside Xbox One, and we got to play it at EGX 2015. Read on for our first impressions.

This potato is gonna get MASHED.

The first thing you have to dissuade yourself of before playing Cuphead is what type of game it isn’t. Seriously, what game genre are you expecting Cuphead to be? Platformer? Adventure? Zelda II-style actioner? Metroidvania? Contra-style run ‘n’ gun shooter? Well, it’s closest to the latter, but even that doesn’t explain things. To boil things down, Cuphead is a constant series of really hard boss battles where you hammer the shoot button and avoid attacks, interspersed by a simple map screen. That’s it. Expect any more than that, or anything more sophisticated than that, and you’ll be disappointed. I know I sort of was. I’d seen all these boss battles but I assumed they only appeared at the end of a level. Nope, they are the level.

The controls are very simple (as is everything about Cuphead except getting through it). You have full movement along a 2D plane, and Cuphead (and his partner Mugman) moves quick and smoothly, and most importantly tightly. They can jump (spinning like Sonic), duck, move around, shoot forwards and upwards, and that’s it. There’s no jumping on enemy heads here, it’s all a matter of shooting things that attack you - specifically giant bosses. They don’t even have glowy weak points that you need to target, for the most part it’s all just pumping them full of lead. Fortunately they have a health bar, which is currently extremely subtle for better or worse. You really have to take your eyes off the boss to notice it, which is a death sentence.

The only other form of gameplay is the aforementioned map, which is played top-down classic Zelda-style, but at the moment there’s very little to do on this map screen other than look around for entrances to levels/battles. It’s pretty but hopefully will be more functional in the final game, perhaps with some secrets to find, otherwise Studio MDHR might as well ditch it in favour of a straight menu list of bosses like Super Meat Boy or something.

I tried out two levels/bosses in Cuphead. The first took place in a farm where a giant carrot/potato thing attacked me by jumping around and spitting detritus at me. Specifically, at first I faced a big potato that spat things at me, then after struggling through that I got to the real boss: a giant hypnotising carrot that fires smaller homing-carrots and mind-beams. This was probably the easier of the two bosses, in that I actually made it past the first part.

Frogs in a music hall? How preposterous!

The second boss took place in a rather cool music hall, where a bunch of dining flies watched and swayed as two huge karate frogs attacked the kid with a cup for a head. And would spit flaming bees, chuck Street Fighter II-esque fireballs, or just bounce over the entire screen. They actually reminded me a little of the two tough guy bosses from The Simpsons Arcade Game, with one really tall and the other a little shorter but still taller than the player characters. It was the fireballs that regularly proved my undoing, requiring split-second reactions. I managed to kill one of the frogs before dying myself at least. Not good enough.

In case you hadn’t figured it out yet, Cuphead is tough. Bosses are relentless from the off and never let up, and while you have infinite continues you can only take three hits before you die and have to restart the whole damn thing again. While you can choose to abandon any boss and search the map for another one to try, other than variety there’s not much to be gained from doing this since they’ll all be of similar difficulty. While there’s none of the muscle memory or pixel-perfect platforming that Super Meat Boy required there are upwards of 30 bosses in Cuphead all with their own attack animations and patterns to learn if you want to get anywhere.

A word to the wise though - never play with a co-op partner unless they’re of equal skill and reaction time and yourself, otherwise there will be a lot of anger, brutal arguments, and break-ups down the road. I made that mistake and played with a partner who absolutely didn’t know what he was getting into. After his quick and frequent deaths I had a choice - keep on playing and let him sit there watching me enjoy myself, or retry. Because once a player’s dead, there’s no reviving. I played the nice guy and clicked “retry”. I’m playing single-player next time.

Giant psychic carrot. Just go with it.

Oh yes, I was enjoying myself. While Cuphead could very well reach levels of monitor-punching-in-ness the like of which I haven’t seen since Dark Souls, it’s also got that perfect “just one more go” factor that Super Meat Boy mastered. The fact that it’s utterly gorgeous totally helps too, with the beautiful early cartoon aesthetic and lovely sound and music really turning Cuphead into a game everyone has to see and play. Even if they don’t get anywhere with it. While I think Studio MDHR are missing a trick not making such a universally visually appealing game into a straight fun platformer that everyone can enjoy, nonetheless it is really fun and imaginative and I’m already looking forward to playing it again when it releases next year. Y’know, just on my own this time.

Most Anticipated Feature: Seeing all the outrageous bosses!