The games are so profoundly different that it’s a terrible comparison. Being a gymnast and being a helicopter pilot are both hard. But what does that even mean?
Dark Souls is a slow, thoughtful game where you progress carefully in order to avoid losing your resources. It’s hard (if you don’t look up how to do everything on the internet) because you have to figure out what works and what doesn’t. But the mechanics themselves are not all that hard.
Cuphead is a fast paced pattern recognition and reflex shooter. Not only that, all the cruelty Dark Souls shows with death and item loss and backtracking Cuphead eschews. When you die in Cuphead you hit continue and start right there - at the beginning of a level that doesn’t take more than three minutes.
So yeah. Maybe you die a lot in both. Maybe both games are hard. But they are ridiculously different.
Yeah, personally I have the same distaste for people that use the term “NES hard”, because not all NES games were really that hard (Dragon Warrior anyone?), so it doesn’t really mean anything.
From what I’ve seen, Cuphead looks comparable to something like an R-type game in terms of difficulty, even though Cuphead plays more like Contra. I may have played Contra 1-3 a bit too much to consider them as difficult, but the R-type series, that’s the definition of bullet hell.
Assuming Cuphead is easier on solo than it was in co-op, I don’t even think the game is that hard. It requires pattern recognition and understanding what a boss does, but after that it’s basically just dodging relatively simple patterns while you hold the fire button down. All the people I’ve seen who struggled with it were just jumping into attacks that were clearly telegraphed. Sometimes there are checkmate situations but not often enough to be a huge nuisance.
Cuphead’s difficulty (single player) is pretty overexaggerated by the media, I think. It’s above average but nowhere near comparable to a truly hard modern or legacy game. Even with all the trouble I had co-op, we still beat the game almost in one sitting and took about 7 hours.
I think they’re both somewhat similar actually. They both involve memorizing patterns. In Darksouls you learn the actions the npc’s and bosses do and respond accordingly. You die a fair amount in both, darksouls is slightly more punishing for death. Cuphead does a little more handholding but not as much as a lot of other games these days. Ultimately neither is terribly difficult but each has a slightly steep initial learning curve that becomes linear then flattens out.
Also in a way I think they both share the similarity of progressiont once you clear an area or beat a boss. For darksouls it’s getting to the next bonfire for cuphead it’s getting to the next level.
In short I don’t think it’s as unfair a comparison as you might think given the fact they’re completely different genre’s. I also think darksouls is a bit over-rated in terms of difficulty. If you ever look at the frames of invulnerability for rolling and such it’s pretty insane. I think once everything doesn’t intimidate you the game becomes a lot easier. I pvped a bit in the darksoul arena areas, after doing that most NPC’s just felt like a joke overall.
I typically sit down to play for an hour or so after the kids go to bed, possibly with the assistance of a glass of wine or a beer. So, I’m not progressing through the game in such a dedicated way. It’s not unusual for me to spend that entire hour beating one level at Cuphead and I’m only halfway through. So, I wouldn’t be quite so dismissive about the difficulty level - although I agree that it is being greatly exaggerated by media surrounding the game. Again, the game is designed to let you jump back in and try again, which is so foreign to old school games. I recently replayed Castlevania III on my 3DS virtual console and that game had you wandering through long levels with basically one way to get through without being hit and then fighting a boss. And if you lose, it’s back to the beginning of the long level. Are the bosses in Castlevania III harder than Cuphead? No, they’re not even close. But in order to fight them and learn their patterns you have to slog through the whole level to get there. To the point where you basically memorize the whole game. Is Cuphead harder than Castlevania III? Hell no. But the difficulty is more about the game design than the actual challenge of fighting the boss.
@DeathBlooms2K8 I take your point in regard to Dark Souls. It’s probably at least somewhat fair to say they are similar in terms of the rhythm of progression, but I don’t think the “Cuphead is the Dark Souls of side scrollers” comments that are appearing in reviews are this thoughtful.
I did not have many problems with bosses. Genie and Scrapyard boss were hardest for me. Overall airplane bosses were a pain because of how much stuff is on the screen, but shrinking ability makes it a lot easier.
I love to recognize various mechanics from classic platformers, like 4-way cannons from Super Mario Bros 3 or walking on ceiling from Sonic 3 & Knuckles, etc.
Yeah, I don’t think it’s an easy game, and there are people who don’t have the skills necessary to beat it. Even people who are capable of beating it might run into some roadblocks, I agree with that. But all the rhetoric I was reading after release made it sound impossible/one of the hardest games to ever come out/the devs need to make an easy mode right now because nobody can beat the game. And I think the game is nowhere even close to that level of hard… people have just been coddled for so many years having games with no challenge or tons of easy modes that when they’re asked to learn a simple pattern and dodge things for a two minute boss fight, it seems way out of reach.
I remember that some of my least favorite areas in the Souls games were the ones with long, arduous gauntlets you had to run through before facing the boss. The worst ones were in Dark Souls 2’s DLC with the cave to the Blue Smelter Demon with all the elevated opponents shooting down on you and the area the fandom dubbed "Horse F-ck Valley preceding the dual saber tooth boss team. These areas were terrible because not only did you have to face some of the tougher bosses in the game but you also had to slog through some of the worst areas in the game to get to them.
Knowing that Cuphead let’s you just respawn at the start of the fight makes it sound really friendly compared to some other games. Sure the fights are hard but it’s solely a matter of skill in that particular fight rather than hiking through a whole bundle of enemies to get to the arena.
It’s a mix for sure. It depends on the perspective you take. The demographic of people who browse video game forums to talk about games outside of playing them I’d say the game is absolutely not as challenging as you may have been led to believe. But there are plenty of people who enjoy video games on occasion who will indeed find this game really difficult. I’m not talking about people like my mother who haven’t touched video games in years, she’d struggle even with the coddling video games. I’m talking about the people who enjoy them but can’t really be categorized as “gamers” since they spend only a couple hours a week playing them.
There will be a demographic of people that play games casually that will have never played a harder game than Cuphead, it’s true.
I guess my point is, if they were gonna be challenged to play a “hard” video game because they liked something about it (the music, the style, the gameplay), they could have been crushed a lot worse. Something like Super Meat Boy or Spelunky makes Cuphead look downright easy I think. And I do suspect when the Meat Boy mobile game comes out soon, which the creators have said should be quite hard, I think some of these people might get another taste of that, heh.
So maybe they’re “lucky” that Cuphead is the first hard game that these players have been intrigued enough to try? They’ll get a pretty difficult (but IMO manageable) game, instead of just being presented a game that will crush their dreams sadistically from the go.
I think Cuphead got picked on for its difficulty mostly for the sake of it. Seems to me these kinds of discussions are just something websites are eager to stir up whenever an alleged ‘old-school hard’ game gets into the spotlight, even when people know what they’re getting into. Like other times before it I don’t think it will last or matter in the end.
-You can crouch under the head extension (first phase) and boxing punch (second phase) attacks
-You can parry the pink question marks between the first and second phases
-Remember to dash
-Spread shot is very good for this fight