Cuphead

Every frame of Cuphead was drawn and inked by hand in the style of 1930s rubber-hose cartoons — Fleischer Studios, early Disney, the Popeye and Betty Boop era — and that alone would make it worth writing about. What makes it one of the most acclaimed games of its decade is that Studio MDHR built a genuinely demanding boss-rush game to carry that art style, rather than letting the visuals do all the work.

Beautiful, and built to punish you

Cuphead's structure is almost entirely boss fights, strung together with occasional run-and-gun levels, and nearly every one of the 100 most-upvoted positive reviews mentions the same two things in the same breath: the animation and music are extraordinary, and the game is hard. One reviewer frames the whole experience as a feverish, half-remembered childhood cartoon nightmare; another, writing on launch day itself, jokes about landing a job at a games outlet after finishing the tutorial — a joke that only works because the difficulty spike immediately after is well known. The praise and the difficulty are consistently reported as the same thing, not two separate qualities in tension.

The honest dissent in the negative-review corpus mostly agrees with that framing rather than contradicting it. "This is going to be an unpopular review," one reviewer writes, going on to praise the art and sound before concluding the underlying game, once the visuals are set aside, plays like "a run-of-the-mill run and gun." Another describes the core loop plainly as "a drastic memorization process of boss animations and their attacks" — accurate, and, for that reviewer, not fun despite enjoying everything around it. This is a fair, consistent criticism from players who clearly respect the craft, and it's held steady across every year since 2017 rather than fading or spiking around any particular update.

A real accessibility gap, not a difficulty complaint

Separate from all of that, and worth naming plainly: the second most-upvoted negative review in Cuphead's entire history isn't about difficulty at all. A reviewer with red-green colourblindness explains that some enemy attacks can only be distinguished by colour, and describes the game as genuinely unplayable as a result, adding that a colourblind mode "would probably not be too difficult" to implement. This is now a pattern worth naming across this library rather than treating as an isolated note — acclaimed, carefully crafted indie games repeatedly shipping without colour-based accessibility accommodations, in games otherwise built with obvious attention to detail. It doesn't undercut what Cuphead achieves visually, but it's a real, documented gap that affected players deserve to know about before buying.

Reading the completion data

The achievement curve tells a story consistent with the reviews. Early milestones — defeating a first boss, learning the parry mechanic — sit between 59% and 77% of the player base, meaning most buyers genuinely engage with the core systems. The rarest achievements, tied to perfect S-rank clears across the base game and DLC without taking damage, fall to under 3%, the steepest kind of mastery curve and exactly what you'd expect from a game whose entire identity is built on difficulty as a reward structure rather than an obstacle.

9 out of 10. Cuphead remains one of the most visually distinctive games ever made, backed by a boss-rush structure demanding enough to earn the difficulty it's famous for. It loses a point for two honest reasons: a real, documented colourblind accessibility gap that a meaningful share of players simply can't work around, and a difficulty ceiling that, fairly and consistently across nine years of reviews, isn't fun for everyone who admires the craft around it. Neither undercuts what it achieves for the players it's built for — this remains an easy recommendation for anyone who wants to be tested.