Developer and Publisher: Studio MDHR

This bout will get red hot. NOW GO!!!

Two brothers named Cuphead and Mugman walk into the Devil’s casino. They start playing craps, and by golly, go on a winning streak! They can’t lose!

They win so many times that the Devil himself comes to see them. Impressed, he makes them a bet. If they win one more time, they’ll get everything he has; but if they lose, he gets their souls. Mugman is scared, but Cuphead only sees dollar signs and throws the dice one more time. Of course, he gets snake eyes. Now the brothers must collect souls for the Devil, or he’ll drag them to hell.

That’s the premise behind Cuphead, one of the most celebrated indie games of the decade. This game tries to be two things: a playable 1930s cartoon, and an insanely difficult (but ultimately rewarding) shooter, and it succeeds wildly on both accounts.

Boss Rush

Cuphead is all about boss battles. Frustrating, difficult, but ultimately rewarding boss battles. You take on wildly original characters in each fight, including Cagney Carnation, the monster sunflower with the mesmerizing hand dance:

Look at those jazz hands!

Djimmi the Great, an Egyptian genie:

Cala Maria, the cursed beauty of the ocean:

Is she firing a fish?

And many, many, many more. The character design in this game is amazing.

Phases

Every battle goes through several distinct phases, with each phase getting progressively harder. For example, Djimmi the Great takes on four forms: his starting form, a sarcophagus, a marionette, and a giant version of himself.

Some bosses have more phases than others, but they all transform during the battle, with the fight getting harder at each turn.

And when you die, you’ll get this handy timeline that shows just how close you were to the end:

So frustrating!

Nothing is more frustrating than getting this close to the end and falling just short.

Degree of Difficulty

Cuphead is famous for being hard, and with good reason. You will die in this game. A lot. Over and over and over again, to the point that you’ll want to pull your hair out in the harder fights.

Each battle lasts about two minutes, which doesn’t sound like a long time until you attempt to stay alive while dozens of enemies and projectiles come at you. All the bosses are different, but they share one common characteristic: the longer the fight goes on, the more projectiles fill the screen until you can barely keep up.

Cuphead is hard, but it is completely fair. Each boss has a predictable pattern, and they all telegraph their most dangerous attacks well in advance. Since the fights only last about two minutes, you can get dozens of practice runs in a single play session. By the time you’re good enough to beat a boss, you’ll get more mad at yourself than at the game when you get hit.

Fingerguns

You may have noticed that Cuphead’s gun is literally his hand. Cuphead and Mugman make a gun shape with their hands, and since this is a cartoon, bullets come out. You gotta love it.

Cuphead has a variety of weapons, but you really only need three: the handgun you start with, the spread gun, and the homing gun.

Starter gun

Spread Gun

Homing gun

The starter gun has good range and power; the spread gun is very powerful but has short range; and the homing gun is weak but allows you to pour bullets into your target while concentrating on dodging enemy fire. Get these three guns and you’re set.

In some battles, you take to the sky and fight bosses in your little propeller plane. The weapons you use in the plane are totally different from those you have on the ground (i.e., you get bombs but don’t get to use your spread gun or homing missile).

Run and Gun

While Cuphead is mostly about boss battles, there are a few optional levels called “Run ‘n Gun” where you do some old-school platforming while fending off swarms of enemies. In these levels, you can collect coins, which you can then use to purchase weapons. I don’t have any pictures of the Run ‘n Gun levels because I skipped almost all of them.

Confession time: I first played (and beat) Cuphead on Steam back in 2017. That time, I beat all the Run ‘n Gun levels because I wanted to get all the weapons, thinking I would need some of them to beat the Devil at the end. This time, I knew better and skipped them, for a very simple reason: they just aren’t that fun. I’ve read that they were a late addition to the game, and it shows, since Cuphead wasn’t built with platforming action in mind. You might enjoy them more than I did. I just collected enough coins to buy the guns I needed and skipped the rest.

A Visual Feast

Cuphead is one of the most beautiful and best-animated games ever made. The screenshots, as impressive as they are, don’t do it justice; you have to see the game in motion to truly appreciate it. All the characters and assets are hand-drawn, perfectly capturing the feel of old-timey color cartoons. It’s a spectacular feat that never fails to dazzle, even after dozens of play sessions.

It also looks fantastic on the Switch’s small screen. The game is just as fluid and vibrant on the screen as it is on my gaming laptop, and I never noticed any hint of a performance drop while I played the Switch version. I own both the Steam and Xbox One versions of Cuphead, and I can tell you that the Switch version looks and plays just as good as the other two.

Spectacular Sound

The sound design is just as amazing as the visuals. The soundtrack, composed by Kristofer Madigan, is a collection of fast-paced ragtime jazz tunes that perfectly complement the visuals and really make the game feel like a cartoon from the 1930s. It’s so good that it’s worth buying separately. Barbershop quartet Shoptimus Prime lend their voices for the game’s title song, as well as a hidden track that plays once you unlock one of the game’s many little side secrets.

The sound effects are fantastic as well, from the clacking of Cuphead’s handgun to the zooms, booms, and explosions of the fights. Many of the bosses have unique vocal effects as well, like Hilda Berg’s warble when she transforms into her final form.

Arguably the best part of the sound design is the announcer, who says a random line at the beginning of each fight in this awesome old-time announcer voice. Hearing him say things like, “this will be a real high-class bout…and begin!!!” will get you pumped to fight every time.

Final Verdict

This is game is hard but worth the effort; when you beat it, you get a feeling that few other games can match. Check out a video of any streamer when they beat Cuphead for the first time. They always look like they’re ready to do backflips, and believe me when I say that reaction is genuine. This game is a tough mountain, but one that is well worth climbing.

That’s why I’m giving Cupehead by Studio MDHR my rating of

What did you think of Musume’s Cuphead Switch Review? Did you play the game on Xbox? Will you be picking it up on Switch or have you already beaten it? Let us know over on Twitter or come and join the SIF Discord server!

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