On the board after completing Cuphead, minus the DLC. I grabbed this game pretty early by my standards, probably only a year or two after it came out. It took me another year to open it, and another year before I took a real crack at it. Does that add up to 2023? Whatever, something like that. When it first made news under the headline of a “very difficult indie game that pays tribute to 1920-30s animation” it was an easy sell for me. I grew up watching old popeye’s and betty boops with my dad and remain a big lover of hand drawn animation where real attention is poured into every frame without cutting corners. In the same way that my dad was a bit curmudgeonly towards Disney outshining Fleischer studios, I went on to be a bit curmudgeonly about all the CGI work outshining Miyazaki.

So, I was excited to check this out, and expected to love it. It took about a month of sporadic play to get through in all. On the animation front, I was very happy. It wasn’t original popeye level, but it was a beautiful tribute and I was really happy to see someone revive that era of artwork in a thoughtful way. They replicated the obvious things that were in old disney (steamboat willy) cartoons as well, that kind of street fighter bouncing dance all the characters are always in as they move around. They got the old Fleischer surreal world right, where punching a giant ship anchor might make it explode into a hundred tiny ship anchors, which can then be squeezed back together like play-doh and reformed. An enemy might go through a full death animation and then come back as a ghost or a tombstone and start beating you all over again. Each fight had something silly to it – the queen bee sends worker bees at you carrying little briefcases and looking exhausted. An adventure time style candy princess sends personified buttered waffles and bubblegum machines as you while trying to snipe you with a candy cane shotgun. The animation is pretty consistent and enjoyable all the way through.

I was a little less impressed with the gameplay and difficulty. To be fair, I didn’t try to A+ everything, and I only played through on normal (which unlocks expert). That said, it wasn’t quite good enough for me to want to play through again on expert. The design of the game is clean, but pretty basic. You play through three worlds (mario style) with about 10 levels each. There are colourful characters all over the 3 worlds, but they all only give you a few repeated lines of dialogue and they don’t seem to have any relation to the game play. No hidden treasures, no secret paths. You accumulate coins which can be used to add new attacks, new finisher moves, or new static abilities/bonuses. This part is a lot of fun and well put together – you can easily tweak your attacks for each enemy which gives you an extra layer to think about for each fight.

The fights themselves are pretty straight forward. It’s not really a bullet hell or a shmup. The majority of the maps are simple bosses that are either on a single backdrop or on a single moving backdrop. You learn the mix of attacks and beat them once you can consistently dodge most of what they throw at you. They all send some pink attacks at you which can be smacked to boost your special/finisher bar. The bosses mostly have two phases, sometimes three, but they don’t have the same consistent “OH SHIT” move to phase two that you might expect in a dark souls game. It’s more like just, two or three ideas of similar difficulty.

There are also a few platform/mario style maps where you have to get from one end to the other. These are generally easier than the bosses, but the process of beating them feels similar – basically learning what will be thrown at you and getting consistent at dodging it all. And there are a few maps where you’re an airplane, fighting things like birds and genies in a side scroller, but again this just feels like another variant on the boss fights, except without the use of all the different attack mods you’ve purchased. Finally, there are some random tombs where you have to defend against ghosts to get a reward, which were very throw-away and didn’t add anything.

Basically everything in this was cleanly and thoughtfully executed for an indie studio to create a pretty polished product. But it feels like they were limited to fairly basic gameplay. Shit comes at you, you jump. Sometimes you gotta’ lilypad across small crossings. Yet the agility of your character feels clumsier than original mario play, and certainly never comes close to feeling like N+ where you can joyfully bounce around the world faster the better your touch. You’re a big fat object with a slow jump dodging slow things. You never get that SHMUP feel of having to go through an really intense sequence of dodges.

The game was tough but never felt really brutal, and never felt like I was pushed to a higher level, even with the finale. (Cool concept just before the finale through, where you have to go across a little gameboard by hitting a die and facing different enemies depending on where you land). I’d give it an indie studio B+ : a solid effort, an enjoyable world to walk around and explore, a loving tribute to an old style of animation, but the character and gameplay were a bit too basic.

Ended up watching the netflix Cuphead all the way through just before playing this, out of sequence. The animation in that is more polished – they must’ve been given a lot more support once they got some netflix $. Great to see that style modernized and I hope we see more of it in shows and games somewhere else.