Most of you know those 1930’s era cartoons, right? With their bouncy, rubbery characters darker themes? If you don’t, congratulations! You’re an average person born in the 2000’s. But for the rest of us whippersnappers who remember those good old days of cartoons, Cuphead is an amazing game.

Gameplay wise, it’s average. It’s your standard boss rush run and gun game, but where it shines is in its difficulty, and its visuals. It’s frustratingly hard, but not impossible or unfair, even. It relies heavily on trial and error, which is something I can give it flack for, but most bosses have easy patterns to memorize. It’s the first time fighting a boss where they shoot a laser the size of the entire screen that there was no way of knowing existed the first time going around that’s the difficult part.

Secondly, there are the visuals. This is where the game really comes to life. It perfectly emulates the rubber-hose style 1930’s cartoons to a T.

And to top it all off, each frame (or “sprite” for those video game people) was carefully hand-drawn and hand colored, with only slight corrections made with a computer. I quote from the creators “We’re making it like they would make it back in that time,” and they captured that perfectly.