Let's Play: Cuphead #1 | Don't Deal With The Devil | Garden Vegetables
1Can we survive the sheer difficultly of Cuphead?
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Cuphead is a run and gun indie video game developed and published by StudioMDHR Entertainment. As the titular character Cuphead, the player fights a series of bosses in order to repay a debt to the devil. The game was heavily inspired by the works of 1930s cartoonists such as Max Fleischer's Fleischer Studios, and sought to keep the works' subversive and surrealist qualities. Cuphead was released on Microsoft Windows and Xbox One on September 29, 2017.
Cuphead is a run and gun game, features a branching level sequence and is based around continuous boss fights. Cuphead has infinite lives and keeps weapons between deaths. Cuphead has a parry ability and parrying various color coded objects will fill up a special meter that will enable Cuphead to perform a special move. The levels are accessible through an action role-playing game-style overworld with its own secret areas. The game has a two-player cooperative mode that adds another human player to the single-player stages playing as Mugman.
On the fictional Inkwell Isle, Cuphead and his brother Mugman are two fun-loving kids who live under the watchful eye of Elder Kettle. Against the elder's warnings, the brothers wander into the Devil's Casino run by King Dice. When the brothers go on a winning streak, King Dice calls upon the Devil who raises the stakes. Cuphead rolls snake eyes and he and Mugman must give up their souls. The Devil makes a deal with them: collect the contracts of the other inhabitants of Inkwell Isle who have lost their souls and he might let the brothers off the hook. They visit Kettle who gives them a potion that allows them to fire blasts from their fingers.
The brothers travel around Inkwell Isle earning contracts from residents who have lost their souls to King Dice and the Devil. Eventually, they make it back to the Casino where King Dice reveals that he too lost a bet, presumably about whether or not Cuphead and Mugman would be able to retrieve the contracts, and fights the two only to lose. The Devil then asks for the contracts and in return they will "join his team". At this point the player can choose whether to hand the contracts over or not. If they say yes, the Devil turns Cuphead and Mugman into his sinister lackeys and the game ends. If they say no, the Devil then battles the brothers.
After a ridiculous and over-the-top battle, Cuphead and Mugman come out victorious with the Devil begrudgingly promising to let them go. The brothers toss the soul contracts in the furnace and race home. They tell the residents that they are no longer under control of the Devil and they all cheer the brothers for their heroic deed.
Cuphead is the first game by StudioMDHR Entertainment, an indie game development studio consisting of brothers Chad and Jared Moldenhauer. Additional animation work was contributed by Jake Clark. Its development began in 2010, and they worked on the game from their respective homes in Toronto, Ontario and Saskatchewan. The game was inspired by cartoons produced by Fleischer Studios, Disney, and cartoonists Ub Iwerks, Grim Natwick, and Willard Bowsky, particularly their most "subversive and surrealist" elements. Chad Moldenhauer called Fleischer Studios "the magnetic north of his art style".
The Moldenhauers watched '30s cartoons in their youth, which Chad Moldenhauer describes as happenstance, based on gifts and VHS compilations. Among other siblings in their Regina, Saskatchewan childhood home, the two shared aesthetic taste and interest in gameplay. They attempted a game in the style of Cuphead in 2000, but lacked the tools to continue. The brothers decided to try again following the success of indie video game Super Meat Boy, developed by Team Meat, in 2010. The character that became Cuphead descended from a 1936 Japanese propaganda animated film where a man with a teacup for a head morphs into a tank. The Moldenhauers emulated the animation because they found it strange, and "right away it stuck".The brothers had previously tried a kappa in a tophat, characters with a plate or fork for a head, and about 150 different designs.
The animation techniques behind Cuphead are similar to that of the 1930s cartoons. Chad Moldenhauer, who had previously worked in graphic design, would hand-draw the animations and paint the backgrounds. He colorized the characters in Photoshop. The gameplay frame-rate of Cuphead runs at 60 frames per second, while the animation runs at 24 frames per second. There is a slight difference between this and the traditional animation of 1930s cartoons. Chad Moldenhauer also saw his process with its human imperfections as a reaction to the perfectionism of pixel art.
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