Disclaimer: This article contains content that may not be suitable for younger students.
Recently our friends have been getting back into Cuphead. Cuphead is described on Steam as a “classic run and gun action game heavily focused on boss battles.” The game was released in 2017 by Studio MHDR Entertainment and is known for its extreme difficulty. It first became famous through playthroughs by different influencers and slowly gained popularity through its brutal boss battles and unique 1930’s art style. Because of this new resurgence for the game and its newer release of the DLC, we decided to write a review to see if the game still holds up today.
The game follows Cuphead and Mugman, two cup-headed kids traversing different worlds and lands, collecting souls for the devil to pay back their gambling debt. To get the souls, they fight bosses, some easy, some extremely hard. As they progress through each land, the bosses get harder until they finally face the devil himself.
We decided only to review the first isle since the whole game can take up to 10 and a half hours, and the game itself was challenging.
We started on the first isle and went straight to the boss fight, “The root pack.” This fight was the easiest out of the five bosses on Isle One. Each had to be defeated to advance to the next island. The root pack has three bosses with different attacks and difficulty ranges going from easiest to hardest. The first boss was a potato, with flaming pink and blue fireballs that you have to time and jump over. The second boss is an onion that cries tears from the sky. The final boss comes in the form of a carrot that shoots laser beams and telepathic rays from its eyes.
In Kennedy’s opinion, the hardest boss out of the trio was the carrot because she was very new to the game and wouldn’t last long enough to kill the boss by herself. Each boss from this fight was unique which made the fight seem more fun than frustrating. The bosses move quick and die relatively fast so finally beating them feels treacherous but very rewarding. This especially goes for the rest of the bosses.
Her favorite boss to fight was Hilda Berg or “Threatnin’ Zeppelin.” Hilda’s fight is different from the others because of its flight mechanic. It’s themed around the zodiac signs and instead of fighting in an arena on the ground it takes place in the sky where you fly in a miniature plane. She prefers these fights better because the planes make it easier to move around. Kennedy specifically liked this plane fight because it became easier the more she played it. As she got used to the controls she started to know what to do for certain phases or enemies that came for us. This made the fight more fun and got her really used to the controls and certain attacks of other bosses. This fight also had an element of surprise because in one of her phases she can randomly change into either the twins or the centaur. This made the fight more engaging because we had to adjust depending on which phase we got.
In Lucas’s opinion, the easiest boss on Isle One was the root pack as well; each stage was easy because it is supposed to be the first boss you fight, so it was easy to avoid and strategize on. The hardest phase was the carrot but only if you did a glitch to fully skip the onion boss by not attacking it, than one the carrot boss it would bring a radish as well as the carrot which was very difficult because you had to focus on avoiding the radish while also not taking damage from the carrot’s homing attacks.
In Lucas’s opinion, his favorite boss to fight was Goopy Le Grande, who is a blue ball of goo who can shape shift as his phases go on. His first phase being a little ball that jumps around dealing damage if he hits you but also being able to expand his face, his second stage is a much larger blue goo ball who now has a giant fist which he uses to punch you, and his final stage is a tombstone that lurks in the background and moves from left to right randomly going forwards crushing whoever is underneath. This is his favorite because you can use a lot of ways to move around in order to avoid the boss, as well as its not extremely difficult to do well on
The most challenging boss we fought on the island was “clip joint calamity,” which features two frogs named Ribby and Croak. Clip joint calamity has three phases, the first one being the easiest and the last the hardest. In the last phase of the three, the frogs turn into a slot machine, randomly selecting an obstacle for the players to dodge. This fight was especially hard because of the slot machine phase. In the slot machine phase there are three different attacks the frogs can do and it’s randomly picked three times. This made the fight harder because we had to quickly adjust to whichever attack the machine chose and survive with the already minimal lives we had left. Though the fight was hard, we had a lot of fun playing it and batting our breath every time we pulled the lever for the next random pick.
Overall, we think Cuphead is an amazing game that manages to hold up difficulty with fun. It can be frustrating but it manages to keep the player engaged even if it’s their third, fourth or fifteenth time trying to beat a boss. We totally recommend it for anybody who likes these games or even beginners who want to get into the genre!
Image courtesy of Ashlyn Bush ’27.
