Game journalists don’t regularly play games, nor do they have a sound understanding of gaming history. Everything that poses any modicum of difficulty for them in the realm of interactive entertainment is always ostensibly attributed to the hardships of Dark Souls. Studio MDHR’s Cuphead has oftentimes been compared to Dark Souls by reviewers because they didn’t grow up in the coin-up era or the 16-bit era and have no other point of reference to make other than From Software’s action-RPG.

Well, given the uneducated claims made consistently and repeatedly by people who don’t deserve to be called game reviewers (much less, journalists) one YouTuber decided to actually fuse together Dark Souls and Cuphead together, creating the unholy and wholly entertaining coagulation of difficulty and hardships known as Cupsouls.

You can check out the minute-and-a-half mockup from YouTube outlet 64 Bits.

The mockup is actually genuinely fun-looking. If this were a game I would have already thrown money at the screen by adding it to the digital store cart and checking out by paying the developer whatever asking price they would have plastered across the store page.

Not only does the mockup manage to capture the elements of Dark Souls but it also manages to mimic the art-style of Cuphead in a very inventive way. The one segment where they’re running down the steps attempting to dodge the pile of bones reminds me of Disney’s Mickey Mania.

And even though the one skeleton boss in the video is designed to mimic the robotic cat boss in the rat stage from Cuphead, I couldn’t help but find myself thinking about the final boss fight from World of Illusion, in terms of using perspective and scale to make the boss more threatening than what it really was.

Anyway, if you were hoping for this to be a real thing, it won’t be. 64 Bits makes it known in the description that this is just a fun little thing to give gamers hope for something that will never be, writing…

“What if Dark Souls was animated like Cuphead? Would you play that? (We would).
Before you ask, no, this is not actual gameplay! It will never be a game, but one can dream right?”

It’s a sad reality that something like this will only exist in the form of a YouTube parody and not an actual game. Instead we’ll have to suffer through more AAA titles designed as shells to sell microtransactions and premium loot boxes. Government regulation can’t come soon enough.