It’s perhaps advisable to treat these moreish examinations of your dodging and parrying skills as palette cleansers between bigger challenges, if you can resist the temptation to binge as soon as you can. Climb up a mysterious rope ladder and you’ll find yourself on King’s Leap, a castle in the clouds where the monarch tasks you with besting his chess themed vassals without the use of weapons. New antagonists have more bounce in their step, greater comic exaggeration in their faces, and some spectacular moments of escalation.īetween the main events, there’s also entertaining respite in a series of side tests that mercifully replace the original’s run and gun levels.

Yet once you start to improv alongside its upbeat jazz rhythm, it’s an absolute hoot. It’s a lot to take in, with safe areas a premium, and infuriating failures almost guaranteed. All demand nimble hopping up and down, but force you to navigate the space in very different ways. The first boss I tried, Bootlegger Boogie, is an ideal scene setter in that respect, staged on three vertical layers that link three otherwise disparate opponents. Then again, if Cuphead were a racing game, it would be the kind that featured oncoming traffic to throw you off your racing line, and screens are often even busier this time, with attack patterns criss-crossing at inopportune moments, forcing you to head pat and tummy rub to escape another fine mess.

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