Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course review – animation hour

metro.co.uk:

After years of waiting the DLC for Cuphead is finally here, with more rock hard enemy bosses and 1930s style cartoon surrealism.

Now that Elden Ring has proven such a massive hit, it’s going to be interesting to see whether other publishers and developers consider the debate over unusually difficult games to be over. Predecessor Dark Souls started the argument and encouraged many games, both those similar in style and otherwise unrelated, to dare to be difficult. It was into this climate that Cuphead was released in 2017 and became another unexpected success, and now it’s finally got its long promised DLC.

Apart from being really, really hard, Cuphead has no other similarities to Dark Souls, since it’s a 2D platform shooter inspired by old school arcade games like Contra and Metal Slug. That’s unusual enough in this day and age but it’s presented in the style of a 1930s cartoon, complete with ‘rubber hose’ style animation and creepy looking character designs.

The end result is one of the most visually impressive games of all time, even though it was developer Studio MDHR’s first game and the two brothers in charge had no previous experience with animation. Despite the very specific inspirations behind the artwork, and the extreme difficulty of the action, Cuphead proved a huge success and now, finally, its DLC is out.

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Although it’s not very important to proceedings, Cuphead does have a story. In fact, it also has a Netflix animated show that, inevitably, has far less distinctive animation than the actual game. In the original release, Cuphead and Mugman were attempting to stop the devil from claiming their souls, after an incautious incident at a rigged casino, and the DLC takes place directly after those events.

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