One of the best recent run-and-gun titles is now available on the Switch – and it feels right at home.
Following its announcement last month, Cuphead finally lands on the Nintendo Switch. Its developer, Studio MDHR, released a trailer for the game’s release on the Nintendo handheld.
Cuphead was originally released for the PC and the Xbox One on September 29, 2017 and is considered one the best games of that year, receiving critical acclaim and commercial success with over three million copies sold by August 2018. It was previously ported first on the macOS on October 19, 2018.
Cuphead is mainly inspired by the ‘rubber hose’ style of animation prevalent in cartoons of the 1930s, such as the work of Walt Disney Animation and Fleischer Studios. The game follows the surreal story of Cuphead and his brother Mugman, who are anthropomorphic chinaware with a penchant for gambling. The duo eventually come face the Devil and lose their souls thanks to a bad bet. What follows is their journey to repay their debts to the Devil, and in order to do so, must take other indebted souls back to him.
The game follows a run-and-gun gameplay loop broken down into boss fights, with only several run-and-gun levels interspersed between. It brought back the era of when games were about continually trying to defeat levels by having infinite tries, mixed with the kind of dedicated animation you rarely see today. It also sparked several debates regarding the difficulty of video games in general, and the certain appeal of niche titles that is fast becoming emergent across different genres. All those words aside, I just think of Cuphead as an amazing example of the payoff of determination, as shown by the lead developers and brothers Chad and Jared Moldenhauer, whose journey into making the game is as worthy of attention as the game itself.
The Nintendo Switch version of Cuphead also comes alongside a free update that is set to be deployed alongside all versions of the game. This update includes:
- Character selection (you can now play as my preferred character, Mugman, even during single-player mode)
- Animated cinematics
- Localized text in a number of different languages
- New animation and art
Cuphead is now available for the Nintendo Switch, PC and the Xbox One family of consoles. A DLC, named The Delicious Last Course, which features a new playable character named Ms. Chalice, is set to release sometime this year.
