It seems like the wait for the Xbox One and PC title Cuphead is absolutely agonizing, but developers Studio MDHR is taking their sweet, precious time to ensure that the quality of the game matches the kind of nostalgic experiences that they grew up with when they were kids.
Polygon actually managed to capture 11 minutes worth of gameplay during the Day of the Devs 2015 live-stream. You can see ID@Xbox’s Chris Charla playing the game alongside Polygon staff in the cooperative mode. You can check out the video below.
Chris Charla tries his hand with each of the available bosses in the game in the demo build, this included an airplane segment against a giant bird in a birdhouse, the two frog brothers in the speakeasy, and the potato and carrot in the vegetable garden.
Charla doesn’t do so great against any of the bosses on his own, but he’s eventually joined in the cooperative mode and they manage to make decent work of the evil vegetables in the garden.
Charla mentions that the duo making the game worked with a live orchestra for the music, penciled in all the animated graphics in the game, then went over those animations with ink, and then created cells before scanning them into the computer. The whole idea was that they wanted to recreate the experience and make it as authentic as possible to cartoons made back in the 1930s.
The gameplay looks sharp and fun, and the art-style is fantastic.
Gameplay variety looks a little on the thin side but the graphics and co-op play could more than make up for it. It reminds me of something that’s played for the sake of the experience and not necessarily because it has Fallout 4 levels of gameplay depth.
Even still, the game will feature a side-scrolling platforming mode in addition to the boss rush. We haven’t seen any of the platforming segments yet but I can’t wait to see what that’s like.
Cuphead is scheduled to release sometime in 2016 for the Xbox One and the PC. It’s one of the few games the Xbox One has that has a leg up over the PS4. You can keep track of the development of the title by paying a visit to the official Studio MDHR website.