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Studio MDHR | imgur.com |
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In my Superlative Albums I Wrote About in 2017 list, this album was awarded the Elphaba Thropp Umbrella for Most Extreme Contrast between Presentation and Content
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There’s a great deal of nostalgia going around. You can smell it in the air and taste it on the streets. Is it any surprise? When we can’t look forward, the only other direction to look is backward.
And so it was that Cuphead waltzed onto the video game scene a few short weeks ago with a spring in its step and a song in its heart. It sets its sight not on strobing eighties synths or pixellated nineties sprites, but on another era entirely.
Channelling the wacky surrealism of early animation, Cuphead is as delightful as its own soundtrack of brassy jazzy funtimes, as exaggerated as its colourful cast of caricatures: rubbery-limbed, in constant motion, possessed of an inexhaustible manic energy. The squiggly sax solos, sassy muted trumpets and frenetic pounding percussion are all ribboned together with inky-smooth production.
But looks can be deceiving. The game boasts a beautifully fashioned cartoonish visual style, fluid and richly detailed and gently grained, but like the animation aesthetic to which it harks back, beneath the surface lurks something much darker.
We know from decades of television schedules that even a continuous stream of failed murder attempts can be considered kid-friendly if acted out by a certain flightless bird and a certain canid. Similarly, our smiley friend Cuphead, when not bobbing up and down like a cork in a bottle, is on a quest to recover souls to repay a bet he lost to Satan. Blink and you’ll miss it, but in preparation for each soul-snatching boss battle he takes a fortifying slurp from his own head.
As the game progresses, it unfolds gradually from standard run and gun platformer fare into something truly horrifying. Cuphead (accompanied in two-player mode, if you're feeling especially sadistic, by his flatware-noggined compatriot Mugman) is trapped in a nightmare where everything is trying to kill him — flowers and birds and fish, concatenated kicklines and casino chips, bloodthirsty trains and ghost ships — and with an astonishingly unforgiving difficulty calibration, you get to relive his Sisyphean failures time and time again, growing more and more frustrated at the cheeky honks and slide whistles that foretell your doom.
The relentless cheer of the soundtrack only serves to heighten the chilling contrast between form and function. Both are unrelenting, looping seamlessly forever, even through the final chapter of the game wherein you literally descend into Hell.
With all the gasping and wheezing, you'll be grateful for a breath of fresh air. There's nothing else out there quite as deceptively, engrossingly ghastly as Cuphead, and Kristofer Maddigan makes sure you won't soon forget the time Dante Alighieri met Bugs Bunny.