Cuphead is an action game in the typical run-and-gun style, with a strong emphasis on boss fights. The images and sounds are meticulously constructed with the same techniques that were used during the era, such as classic hand-drawn cel animation, watercolor backdrops, and authentic jazz records. These were inspired by cartoons that were produced in the 1930s.

You may play as either Cuphead or Mugman in single-player or local co-op mode as you explore exotic realms, gain new weapons, master strong superpowers, and uncover hidden mysteries while you work toward paying off your debt to the devil.

The unpredictable behavior of the monsters is likely to be the source of irritation for most players; even though these bosses often have three distinct phases, each of which has its own set of attacks, these attacks are typically picked at random during each phase. This means that you can’t just stand there thinking, “Right, he’s going to do this attack, then he follows up with that attack, then I can get him,” as though you were learning a sequence of fight choreography: instead, you have to wait to see which of their attacks they’ll use next and react quickly (and often you won’t have a lot of time to do this). This means that you can’t just stand there thinking, “Right, he’s going to

This is a game in which you are expected to take on these boss fights repeatedly and slowly learn every attack permutation as you edge ever closer to completely defeating them. At the risk of sounding like an intolerable “get good” macho man, practice does make perfect with this one: this is a game in which you can expect to sound like an insufferable “get gud” macho man.

Even though there is a mode called “Simple,” which lowers the amount of health each boss has by a significant amount and generally makes things easier to handle for newcomers, this mode is not an ideal solution because it removes a large number of boss attack types – even entire phases at times – and does not reward you with a soul contract when you defeat them, which means you cannot progress to the later stages of the game and complete it. You should by all means, think of it as a method to ease into Cuphead’s parry and weapon-changing features, but you’re going to want to move to the Regular difficulty as soon as you possibly can to make sure that you don’t miss out on a lot of the game’s appeal.