Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course
This mouthwatering dessert looks worth the long wait
PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One
Developer/publisher Studio MDHR Entertainment Format PC, PS4, Switch, Xbox One Origin Canada
Release June 30
By the time Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course is released, it will be nigh-on four years since it was announced. That is, by any measure, a long development time for a piece of DLC. But this is no ordinary add-on. And Studio MDHR is no ordinary developer. As COO Maja Moldenhauer puts it, “We’re constantly challenging ourselves to sweat the small details that not everyone might notice, but which will surprise and delight the people who do. Something we’re really proud of with The Delicious Last Course is the richness and detail we’ve put into every aspect – from design to animation to painting to music, and everything in between.”
The success of the run-and-gun original, Maja says, was humbling, inviting the development team to “ask ourselves at every turn what the best thing for the [DLC]’s quality was, and to follow that as our true north, so to speak.” What that means is an expansion that’s more, well, expansive. As extra dishes go, The Delicious Last Course is a belly-filling share-size pudding: another Inkwell Isle to add to the existing archipelago, with 11 new bosses, hidden secrets, extra weapons and charms, a new soundtrack performed by a 140-strong orchestra, and over 25,000 frames of hand-crafted animation. Hence: four years.
When you see the new bosses, it’s easy to understand what took so long. A screenfilling giant casually picks up a grizzly bear and drags it toward you. Tiny gnomes poke up from the ground, their hats acting as spike traps, while others try to hit you with stone hammers, and flocks of geese – some with diminutive riders – flap across the stage. And that’s just one level. A fight against a spider boss takes place across three layers; while you’re contending with a bouncing caterpillar it lobs at you, there are ants pumping smoke rings towards you. These can be parried into the boss, however, and the potential threat inadvertently becomes an ally.
Parrying is simpler with The Delicious Last Course’s most significant addition: a new playable character. Ms Chalice appeared in the original, albeit as something of an archetypal damsel. Here, she’s the star, equipped with a double-jump for increased mobility and the ability to dash-parry, batting back pink projectiles by rushing into them. The Moldenhauers won’t be drawn on what effect that might have on the difficulty of these new encounters, but we’re reminded of our question to Hidetaka Miyazaki regarding whether Sekiro’s revival mechanic was about making the game easier or giving him licence to make it even harder. It’s possible the Moldenhauers want to open Cuphead up to an even wider audience than the already successful original. But the smart money is on the latter.
The motivation behind making more Cuphead, Chad Moldenhauer tells us, is simple: they fell in love with the world they’d
As extra dishes go, The Delicious Last Course is a belly-filling share-size pudding
created and wanted to spend more time with it, and had a few ideas left on the cuttingroom floor when the original shipped. “As an independent team working on our first title, we absolutely got to the finish line with things we couldn’t include for time and budgetary reasons – homages to parts of classic cartoons we wish we could have made, themes we wanted to explore, and designs we couldn’t find a home for in the original title. This affection for what we had built and nagging desire to see these ideas through was sort of the perfect storm that led us to The Delicious Last Course.”
The Moldenhauers say they consider this the end of the story, and it’s clear they’re keen to go out with a bang. As such, it’s natural they don’t want to give too much away, so players can enjoy the thrill of discovery. “It’s something we grapple with all the time,” Maja says. “Our guiding principle has been that we want to show people just enough to get them excited about all the things they haven’t seen yet, if that makes sense.” Job done, we’d say.