Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course

Cuphead might now hold the record for longest gap between an initial release and its first piece of DLC, at five years. Much like the original game, the long development time was well spent, as the insane amount of effort poured into making its animation and soundtrack as lively and authentic as possible makes it just as much of a joy to behold in 2022 as it was in 2017. Unfortunately, none of that time was apparently spent on gameplay balance, as the DLC’s new equipment and playable character suffer from blatant power creep. For example, while the auto-aiming weapon was the weakest in the original game, The Delicious Last Course introduces a second auto-aiming weapon…that’s also reasonably powerful, rendering most other options obsolete. This kind of careless design noticeably detracts from the tightly-wound machine that was Cuphead’s gameplay, but the DLC is still recommended as a lovingly surreal, decently entertaining throwback. They even avoided adding any more contentious platforming levels.