'Cuphead' players have mastered the game, but there's still another mountain to climb
Something wild happened this week: A Cuphead player bested every one of the game's bosses in 41 minutes without taking any damage, dodging, or using ability-boosting Charms.
It was and is impressive, but something's missing.
Cuphead is a brand new game from Studio MDHR, which spent multiple years crafting a traditional-if-infernally challenging side-scrolling action game. The music and hand-drawn art suck you in, but it's the punishing difficulty that constantly urges you to git gud.
It's a more forgiving game than you might expect given some of the hyperbolic discourse that's bouncing around the online game-o-sphere. But it's challenging nonetheless, and very difficult to master.
Yet here are all these YouTube videos featuring superhuman players dodging enemy fire and taking down bosses like it's nothing.
Check out a few of them here and see if you can figure out what I thought was missing....
Figure it out? All of these completion montages are stitched-together footage of each round. Behind the clean, near-perfect execution that you see, how many hours of failures, aborted attempts, and restarts are you missing?
I'm not suggesting that the above players (and those like them -- YouTube is flooded with Cuphead videos) didn't pull off an impressive feat. But I want to see someone take it further.
So here's my challenge: I'd love to see a full, uncut runthrough of Cuphead with first-attempt completions of every stage. No failures. No restarts. Just the game, unfiltered, from beginning to end.
It's not something I could ever pull off, personally. But I think someone out there definitely can, and I'd sure like to see it.
Topics Gaming
Adam Rosenberg is a Senior Games Reporter for Mashable, where he plays all the games. Every single one. From AAA blockbusters to indie darlings to mobile favorites and browser-based oddities, he consumes as much as he can, whenever he can.Adam brings more than a decade of experience working in the space to the Mashable Games team. He previously headed up all games coverage at Digital Trends, and prior to that was a long-time, full-time freelancer, writing for a diverse lineup of outlets that includes Rolling Stone, MTV, G4, Joystiq, IGN, Official Xbox Magazine, EGM, 1UP, UGO and others.Born and raised in the beautiful suburbs of New York, Adam has spent his life in and around the city. He's a New York University graduate with a double major in Journalism and Cinema Studios. He's also a certified audio engineer. Currently, Adam resides in Crown Heights with his dog and his partner's two cats. He's a lover of fine food, adorable animals, video games, all things geeky and shiny gadgets.
