Is Cuphead really as hard as everyone is making it out to be?
Tough But Fair
Cuphead, the long-awaited action game inspired by classic animation of the early 20th Century, finally arrived last Friday, and our own Sam Barsanti dropped by to give a review this week. Sam applauded the game for its visuals and playability but wasn’t completely sold on its level of difficulty, which is pretty damn high. Down in the comments, though, Duwease stepped up to discuss a few different flavors of video game struggle and why Cuphead’s is especially tolerable:
Much hay is made about this game’s difficulty, but after playing it, I think there are some incredibly important subtleties to the game’s design that only make it seem difficult.
Difficulty, to me, is some aspect of the game that causes frustration. Overcoming the frustration produces joy, so with a proper balance, you end up challenging the player just enough to get the most joy out of victory. While the game features many, many player deaths, and busy, chaotic looking screens, it actually works hard to reduce frustration. In this way, it’s a lot less like old-school games and more like Super Meat Boy. Boss battles typically cap out at around 90-120 seconds for a successful run, and restart on death in just a second or two, so there’s no sense of replaying long, bland parts or waiting impatiently that typically breeds frustration. And the battles themselves are not the twitch-fest “get lucky” sort of battles they look like. They’re strategic. There’s almost always a simple, safe strategy once you’ve figured out the ideal loadout and are familiar with the attacks. I replayed a good chunk of the game to show it off to my son last night, and I blew through each battle in one or two tries, netting B+’s or A’s. Due to these modern design tweaks I find the game compulsively playable in a ”just one more try” kind of way. Instead of feeling like a setback, each death feels like I snatched a little more knowledge and am one step closer to mastery.
Elsewhere, Exy pointed us to a pretty awesome video of what the game looks like running on as close to an era-appropriate television as you can get. It must have been a nightmare to get this running properly, but damn if it doesn’t look awesome:
Teach Me
This week also brought the first installment of my multi-part Middle-Earth: Shadow Of War review, as I covered the game’s opening hours, which serve as a very long and mostly mind-numbing tutorial. This is a deeply complex game, so it’s something of a necessary evil, but one has to imagine there’s a more engaging method to get this tutorial stuff out of the way. In the comments, Shinigami Apple Merchant kicked off a discussion about the difficult act of finding the right balance between gentle introductions and overbearing teaching methods:
Shame to hear the good ole AAA bumper lanes/safety net interactive tutorials are firmly in place and keep one from letting loose from the offset on the gold material of this sequel. It’s like going to Disney World and being stuck in a museum tour wandering around all these breathtaking rides but never being allowed to actually go on one. But I suppose that’s the nature of the beast in the modern gaming world.