Cuphead

Cuphead earns a 9.1 overall, and that score certifies it as a genuine landmark — one of the most beautiful games ever made, one of the best-sounding, and a phenomenon whose reach now extends far beyond the medium. It is a near-flawless act of craft with a single, deliberate limitation in its difficulty, and a story it never wanted to tell. The 9.1 reflects a game that does almost everything it attempts at the very highest level, gated only by a challenge that, by design, is not for everyone.

Buy it for the craft and the challenge

Buy Cuphead if you love any of the things it does so extraordinarily well. This is the game for action players who relish a hard-won victory, for anyone who appreciates art and animation as a craft, for jazz lovers, and for players seeking the pure, escalating thrill of mastering a brutal fight one phase at a time. The hand-drawn 1930s animation and the live-recorded jazz score are reasons enough to experience it on their own, a feast for the eyes and ears unmatched in gaming, and the boss design beneath them is some of the finest action design the medium has produced. It is also one of the best couch co-op games of its generation, a shared trial that bonds two players through repeated failure and eventual triumph. If you can meet its difficulty, Cuphead offers a complete artistic and mechanical experience that lingers long after you put it down, and the satisfaction of finally beating a boss that defeated you fifty times is a feeling few games deliver as purely. For the right player, it is essential — a modern classic that will be remembered for decades.

Skip it for story or if difficulty defeats you

Skip Cuphead, or approach with clear eyes, if its limitations are dealbreakers. If you play primarily for narrative, there is almost nothing here — the 6.5 story is a one-sentence premise, and the game makes no apology for it. And if you lack the patience or reflexes for punishing difficulty, Cuphead will frustrate more than it delights: dying thirty to fifty times to a single boss is the normal rhythm of the game, not a worst case, and the design deliberately gates its true finale behind the harder difficulty, so the Simple setting leaves you with an incomplete experience. This is honest gatekeeping rather than a flaw — the difficulty is core to the identity, and the game wants you to earn its ending — but it genuinely excludes players who cannot or do not want to climb that curve, and there is no shame in being one of them. A player who needs story, accessibility options, or a gentler challenge should know going in that Cuphead will not bend to meet them, because its uncompromising nature is exactly what makes it what it is.

A three-pillar phenomenon

What ultimately elevates the 9.1 from a great score to a verdict on something special is the scale of what Cuphead became. It is not merely an excellent game; it is a cultural phenomenon resting on three pillars — the game itself, a critical and commercial triumph with over ten million sales, a Metacritic 88, three Game Awards, a BAFTA for Best Music and two Annie Awards; the IP, expanded into The Cuphead Show!, a three-season Netflix animated series that gave the characters the life the game left implicit; and the culture, a vast and devoted community of fan artists, cosplayers, speedrunners and tribute-makers who have kept the world alive and growing. Few games of any budget achieve this kind of reach, and almost none from a tiny independent studio, which makes Cuphead proof of what uncompromising craft and singular vision can accomplish. The 9.1 is the verdict of a near-perfect artistic achievement and a genuine landmark — beautiful, brutal, brilliant, and beloved — held just short of the absolute summit only by the deliberate narrowness of its story and the steepness of the wall it asks every player to climb. For those who climb it, there is nothing else quite like it.