Booming bass rattles my eardrums, and waiters flit to and fro with platters of practically unidentifiable hors d'oeuvres as I stare intently, mouth nearly agape, at the beauty of Cuphead

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Cuphead E3 2015 Screenshots 13 IMAGES

Cuphead has a look that makes pretty much any organized set of words seem trite and empty. One look at it will make you angry at yourself for every time you described a game as "a playable cartoon." You wasted that phrase. I don't care which game you said it about, you wasted it. The fully hand-drawn look perfectly apes 30's era funnies (right down to the delightfully coarse film grain filter), and the animation is not only buttery smooth; it's relentless. Nothing is static, nothing ever stands still."Every 71st frame or so, that pirate flips up his eye patch real quick," says Jared Moldenhauer, co-founder and lead designer of Cuphead. I had missed it. My eyes were following said pirate's jolly arm swaying, which, particularly as he was standing atop a boat, made me think of Mickey Mouse's gait in "Steamboat Willy," a similarity I doubt is a coincidence. But enough of how gorgeous it is; you can see that for yourself. As far as how it plays, the easiest way to sum it up is that Cuphead is just as much a student of 80s and 90s sidescroller design as it is of Depression-era animation.In its current form, Cuphead is largely made up of boss fights, the kind that would have robbed 8 year-old me of every quarter in my pocket in short order. That jolly pirate from above is one tough cookie. At the time of this writing, Jared tells me that no one from the press has beaten him. I couldn't stop trying though. Like Gunstar Heroes and similar old games, bosses have learnable attack patterns, but unlike so many of those older games, each has a deep bag of tricks to pull from. This pirate would call a squid friend to splatter ink everywhere, obscuring my vision. He'd call in a shark attack from off the left side of the screen too, or pull out an umbrella and squeeze little pink bullets from it. Each fight really demands that you pay close attention, and that you have sharp reflexes, just like arcade games of yore.Despite the bevy of boss fights, Jared did clarify that there are more traditional scrolling levels in addition; they just aren't ready for showtime just yet. Another surprise is how much more there is to the weapon system than is readily apparent. The demo build only features two weapons: a standard long shot, and a shorter range spread shot. However, in the final game there will be many more, though you'll have to pick two as your loadout when entering a level and stick with them. Each weapon has "EX" and super attacks, which draw on a meter you build by shooting stuff. These alternate attacks can vary greatly from weapon to weapon, so in the long run, couch co-op partners will want to coordinate their loadouts for maximum synergy.While Jared took a couple of interviews, I sneak in several more attempts at a particularly tricky queen bee boss, though even once he noticed, he seemed sheepish about asking me to give someone else a shot. Heand his brother (the other co-founder) are fairly new at all this, and it shows in only the best ways. They quit their jobs and mortgaged their houses to make this game, and as such, aren't so concerned with "messaging" or "embargoes" or any of the other extraneous things that accompany modern game-making. Jared is just there to happily, humbly tell me about Cuphead; he is the literal opposite of the circus taking place around him, and so is his game.For more E3 news and previews, be sure to check out our big E3 hub page

Vincent Ingenito is IGN's foremost fighting game nerd. F ollow him on Twitter and tell him what you want him to test out next time he plays Street Fighter 5.