Cuphead, Take Me Away: Why an Extremely Hard Game Can Be Relaxing
First I have to kill the bee cop. I’m inside a hive inside a vibrating yellow apartment building in a cartoon city that looks like it was hand-drawn by somebody’s great-grandparents, trying to shoot this fat bee enough times to make him buzz off for good. I’m dodging harried bee workers on their morning commute, with papers sticking out of their overstuffed briefcases, and weaving between the candy-colored shrapnel from the cop’s bombs. If I make it past him I come face to face with the queen, who alternates two different kinds of projectiles between waves of bees that fly out like fighter jets. If I land enough shots on her, she then turns into a jet that takes up the entire bottom of the screen, with all of her weapons trained right on me. And this entire time, from the very start, there’s a sea of honey constantly rising up from below, forcing me to jump from platform to platform this entire time to avoid getting hurt. Three hits (sometimes four, depending on what power-ups I have equipped) and I’m dead.
Scenarios like this are why Cuphead has quickly developed a reputation as a brutally hard videogame. I played this same battle for almost an hour before winning it, immediately jumping back in as soon as I died every time until I finally took that queen bee down. It sounds frustrating. It should be frustrating. And I’ll admit to yelling out after a few failed attempts and maybe slamming the controller onto the couch once or twice. Despite those momentary setbacks, though, I never really felt all that angry while playing the game. The opposite actually happened: Cuphead is one of the most soothing and relaxing games I’ve played this year.
Part of that can be attributed to the game’s gorgeous aesthetic. Its Fleischer Brothers-aping art style and jazz score evoke the late ‘20s and early ‘30s, a period that in reality saw great cultural upheaval and moral recalculation, but long ago faded into the warm glow of “simpler times” nostalgia. As Paste’s Holly Green wrote yesterday, there’s something inherently comforting about how Cuphead looks and sounds.
That’s not the whole story here, though. Cuphead’s difficulty might be alienating, its repetition numbing, to many, for completely understandable reasons. It’s the game’s structure that makes it not just tolerable but legitimately relaxing for me, both how the boss battles that make up most of the action play out and how I access them.