I finally beat Queen Bee, it was hardest than I expected! It took two days to beat her…
Protip:
Bring the Charge Shot weapon to every fight once you get it.
Also, seems like there’s another unlockable filter:
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I haven’t played yet but I’ve watched a few streamers, and it definitely seems like the difficulty is being vastly overexaggerated. Even streamers who say they aren’t particularly good at games or this particular genre have been able to get through the game in just a few days of playing. That’s… not what I would call a hard game.
I think it just goes to show where people’s expectations are right now. Any sense of being asked to get better is met with a ton of resistance/fear. Being asked to do the same task a few times until you do it the way a designer intends is, like, terrifying to so many people. So many people have terrible pattern recognition/problem solving skills in games. “If I stand here I’ll get hit, so… I’ll just keep standing here and die repeatedly, then say the game is too hard.”
I will play through it soon to solidify my thoughts but I’m sure I will find it a moderately-challenging-in-parts but not “hard” game. In fact I’ll probably play it co-op (which I heard was quite a bit harder?).
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Yeah really there were only a few bosses that gave me a lot of trouble (meaning for me about 8+ deaths). Most bosses are rather short so beating them on your first or second tries isn’t unlikely if your instincts are good.
Took me about 3 hours to get through the game playing every boss on Regular.
The only thing that really got me frustrated in the game was the Pacifist challenge, and that’s completely optional.
Moral of the story: Never Gamble!!!
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And above all: Never EVER deal with the Devil!
Was it hard enough for you too? 
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Beat Cuphead co-op. I imagine it’s quite a bit harder than single player, but from what I’ve heard and from what I’ve seen on stream. There are a few reasons it’s harder… the main one is that the screen is just really muddy with twice the bullets. If you and your opponent use smoke dash at the same time, it can be pretty hard to tell which one is you when you land. We died several times because we weren’t sure which character was ours. Some boss attacks also kinda freak out when two players are on the screen (the Cala Maria ghost attack sometimes goes after 1 person, sometimes goes after neither, and sometimes goes after both players in some weird criss cross that always got us hit).
But the other reason it was hard is because the game is just buggy in co-op. Any time one player freezes the screen (with super or parry), it eats the inputs of the other player for half a second or so. If you were trying to jump over an attack, too bad, you just get hit. We gave up parrying some (important!) attacks entirely because it actually hurt our chances of success more than helped us. Also, if you were holding a charge shot, it would randomly disappear if your opponent did something (parry, shoot an EX, shoot a super). I can’t imagine any of these were intentional design choices, and I think it marred the game for us.
There was also a really bad glitch where my controller would rumble permanently until I got hit. I often had to deal with it for 1 or 2 straight minutes before I died. If it got triggered when I died, then I would just quickly get hit on purpose and then restart the level. Sometimes even that wouldn’t reset it, and we had to reboot the game. I imagine this is, again, a co-op glitch since I’ve never heard anyone else talk about it.
I feel like co-op probably wasn’t tested all that much.
Overall I think I like the game, though. I wish some things were a little tighter… like, I wish so many levels didn’t hide stuff in the foreground to block attacks, I wish smoke attack didn’t make your character actually disappear, and I wish the timing for parrying didn’t feel so inconsistent. Even by the end of the game, my co-op friend and I felt like we didn’t really have great control over our characters… it was weird. I also probably wish there were fewer “random” checkmate situations, where 2 or 3 random factors come together in a brutal way such that you kinda just have to get hit. I dunno how I would fix that though. Despite this, the art and music style is really awesome, and the bosses (especially the second-to-last boss) are really creative.
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I’m still not through the entire game, but this is probably my only real complaint. I don’t know what it is about the parry that makes it seem so random but I don’t feel like I’m significantly better than the moment I first played the game and I can be standing alone in a run and gun level with a single pink enemy and it’s still a risky proposition.
The thing to realize is that when you jump and try to parry, you’re actually spinning a pink hitbox around your character (you can see it if you just jump and press A again without anything near you). This means that you aren’t trying to double-jump off an enemy, you basically have to press parry when the enemy is at least half of Cuphead’s body length away from you. Once you get used to pressing it really early, you should be fine.
The trouble comes when you try to parry stuff that’s moving downwards (and you jump up into it). This plus having to press it early means you usually get hit unless you kinda mash A when you jump.
It’s fine and it is a consistent interaction, but it feels a little “mushy” because of how early you have to hit it. And in the clutch, when you’ve spent years double-jumping off enemies in platformers, your muscle memory will default to you getting hit.
I think it was juuuuuust right 
Even at tricky points I never felt like it became unfair. My brother in law co-oped with me on my first playthrough and even he had a blast despite not usually enjoying platformers.
Infil is right about co-op though, it’s got some wonky stuff that I assume will be addressed in a later patch or something
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This probably accounts for it. Obviously I can see the animation but it hadn’t really occurred for me that I needed to ensure the link swirl was making contact with the bullet/object/enemy. This explains why jumping up into down traveling enemies is such a problem.
The overall result is that it feels very inconsistent. In a game where you are more or less constantly making quick decisions based on small visual cues to predict what is going to happen in the next split second it seems unnecessary.
The other issue I have is mixed up inputs. Sometimes when I go to air dash he will do a super move. I can’t believe this is me hitting the wrong button…
Can’t say that ever happened to me. I hope you’ve rebound the buttons from the default, they are terrible otherwise. They put all your important actions on the face buttons, so hitting them simultaneously isn’t really doable. I really don’t know why they did this.
In the end I put shoot on RT, jump on A, dash on B, super on X, and switch weapon on LT/LB. Putting shoot on RT meant I had easy access to all the other face buttons, and doing jump -> dash, or jump -> super is quite easy. You can’t dash and then do super instantly so I didn’t have to go B to X. My co-op friend did the controls differently, keeping X for shoot and putting everything else on the triggers.
Lol. Yeah I know this is true, but I haven’t remapped them. Probably should but it’s such an old school game that the face buttons seemed like the old school way to play. I’m surprised they let you switch weapons with LB. it should have been back (select).
I’m half way through played a bit of coop, bit of solo. Solo is much much easier. It seems to me when you play coop your damage is a bit less than half of what you do in solo. As a result the phases are longer in addition to there being more items cluttering the screen.
I mean I get why they did it that way splitting your damage in half would make coop definitively easier considering you have the ability to resurrect your teammate but there are a lot of situations (mostly when your teammate dies at the top of the screen) that the resurrect perk isn’t even applicable. Not to mention some ads that are 1 shots in solo suddenly take more than that so you can’t clear them as quickly. Also there was a run and gun level int he first world that involved moving vertically up a tree, holy ■■■■ that was annoying with the camera for two people.
Ultimately I get the design choice for coop they wanted to balance the ability to resurrect. Still historically in the classics contra, battletoads, etc. the games were easier in coop and that was cool because it encouraged you to play together.
One final thought and this may just be my experience but the game is buggy in coop when playing on xbox which really came as a shock to me. I had multiple times when we were playing where a screen freeze would cause the game to crash, the screen would just be frozen and the gunshot audio would be looping which forced me to close the ap and relaunch. To my dismay whenever this happened we lost all progress made since the last time we were at the main menu. we had the first island completed and lost all of our progress the first time it happened. As a work around we continually exited to the main menu after beating each level there after. And while that works it’s really annoying, the load times on xbox suck and it really doesn’t make sense that the game is buggy on a console.
I never bought it but I heard it’s as hard as dark souls is this true?
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Word of advice, ignore any time someone uses the phrase “dark souls” to describe another game.
As far as your question, haven’t played both games.
Yeah I agree dark souls isn’t hard once you get used to it.