Over the weekend, my partner and I got a little bored. I’d spent most of my Saturday in bed playingHelldivers 2, and we wanted to do something together that was more engaging than watching a movie. He suggested we buy a couch co-op game,a genre that is in short supply these days, and the title we finally settled on wasCuphead.
I was a little hesitant – while critically acclaimed for its gameplay, soundtrack, and art style, it’s also notoriously an incredibly difficult game. I worried that I’d be bad at it, or that we’d get frustrated with each other and end the night on a bad note. But we didn’t.
Cuphead came out in 2017, but it’s aged like fine wine. Inspired by the gorgeous rubber hose style of old American animation, it’s still a delight to look at and play. It throws you into the shoes of Cuphead and Mugman, two anthropomorphic drinking utensils who stupidly gave the Devil their souls and now have to collect ‘soul contracts’ from his runaway debtors to save their own. The gameplay is mostly a mix of platforming and run and gunning. It’s unforgiving.
We’ve been picking up Cuphead almost every night, chipping away at levels in short bursts. I am not a patient person, which is why I’d avoided Cuphead before. I get frustrated easily, and it doesn’t take much friction for me to abandon a game completely. Cuphead is all about friction, and I imagine that I’d have rage quit for good within the first hour if I hadn’t been playing with my partner. In contrast, my partner is a perfectionist. He wants to do things right, even if it means smashing his head against something for hours or days. Unlike me, he does not give up the moment a game gets difficult. Satisfaction is enough of a reward for him, while I usually need more external motivation.
As expected, I got frustrated very quickly. While I’m the one who gets paid to write about video games, it does take me quite a lot of effort and time to lock into a game and perfect my combat skills, while my partner has quick reflexes and a bizarre ability to be good at any combat-oriented game he picks up. I found myself apologising over and over – every time I died, he had to hop on over and parry my gloating ghost before I disappeared off screen so that we could continue fighting together, which disrupted our flow. I felt like an inconvenience, not contributing enough damage to justify how much saving I needed in every level.
This is actually a drawing of my partner and I.
But my partner never got frustrated. This is the whole point of the game, he told me, after I apologised for the thirtieth time that night. I save you, and you save me, and we take the weird boss down together. He washappyto be playing with me, in spite of my obvious skill issue. Take your time, he told me, lock in, memorise the attack patterns, and we’ll get through it.
His patience taught me how to cultivate my own. I learned how to unfocus my eyes slightly while playing, making me suddenly able to focus entirely on my own character and see all the attacks coming towards me at once. We memorised phases and enemy movements, learning to get through levels with muscle memory. We began to verbally cue each other – he’d remind me when to jump and duck, and I’d say “Now!” when it was time to dash past an enemy. Slowly but surely, we started to progress, and more importantly, we started to play better as a team.
Cuphead reminded me exactly why my partner is my best friend, but it also reminded me that the things I admire in him are in me too, as long as I sit with discomfort instead of immediately moving around it. His patience with me reminded me that I can be patient with myself, because it does pay off. We finished a run and gun last night that we’d been picking at over two days, and we both collapsed with laughter and relief, throwing our controllers down and high fiving. I felt like I was riding a high, which is unfamiliar precisely because I give up on things so easily. Somehow, seven years after release, Cuphead showed me something in myself I didn’t believe was there.
Cuphead
WHERE TO PLAY
Paying homage to both classic ‘shmup’ games and Jazz Age cartoons, Cuphead is a shooter developed by Studio MDHR. Playing as the titular character, you must take down a series of tough bosses. A second player can join in co-op gameplay, assuming the role of Mugman, Cuphead’s brother.
