Cuphead Review

Studio MDHR did the insane thing. Every frame animated by hand on paper, every background painted in watercolor, every cue recorded by a working big band, all of it in service of a run and gun that most studios would have finished in a year with tweened sprites. The result is the only game that genuinely looks like a 1930s cartoon instead of a filter imitating one, down to the wobble in the line and the density of the ink. That would be a novelty if the fighting were soft, and it is not.

Bosses run three or four phases with no checkpoints, the telegraphs are honest, the patterns are learnable, and the parry on anything pink keeps you leaning forward instead of hiding behind cover. Death is instant and so is the retry, which is the loop that makes a punishing game feel generous rather than cruel. There is no story worth the name beyond a debt owed to the Devil and a lot of grinning inkwells, and the platforming stages are the weakest stretch of the package. As pure craft, nothing else on the shelf is close.