The Cuphead Show: Season 1 REVIEW–Underwhelming and Forgettable
Cuphead is a run-and-gun game that you most likely have heard about if you are into indie gaming. StudioMDHR’s 2017 game was released and has been hailed by many as the best indie game. The popularity of the indie game and the art style that is typical for a cartoon show made The Cuphead Show a huge success.
The Cuphead Show is not a show that fans and those who aren’t familiar with the game will enjoy. The episode’s first episode is wonderful. Many of the jokes work, the Devil sings a great song, and it ends with the impression that things will only get worse.
The remaining eleven episodes, however, fail to meet the show’s expectations. The stakes seem to diminish the more episodes are aired. Because you know that there is nothing at risk, you don’t feel invested in Cuphead and Mugman’s adventures. Even if you do stay for the humor (which the show often does with excessive sound effects and bizarre facial expressions), you won’t be invested in the story.
There are moments when the animation is really good or there are funny jokes. But The Cuphead Show doesn’t have enough substance for it to be worth the effort of watching beyond its first few episodes. The source material should have made the show entertaining, but The Cuphead Show’s inability to justify its existence grows with each episode.
The show doesn’t even try to follow its main plot. Cuphead and Mugman place a bet on their souls and lose to the Devil at a casino. They are told by the Devil that he may spare their souls if the Devil collects the “soul agreements” from his runaway debtors by midnight on the next day. As such, Cuphead, Mugman, and other players fight boss after boss in an effort to collect every soul contract within the deadline.
The writers choose a carnival setting for the show instead of a casino. This is understandable considering that a casino setting would have been inappropriate for a younger audience. Cuphead also loses his soul via a skeeball game, and not by rolling dice. The show makes a surprising change. Cuphead and Mugman escape from the Devil before Cuphead can collect his soul. Instead of collecting soul contracts, their main plot revolves around the boys who try to stop the Devil from finding them and taking Cuphead’s life.
This is what I call the main plot, but only 4 of the 12 episodes actually address this theme. The show is unable to decide whether it wants to be a SpongeBob Squarepants-style cartoon with a new storyline for each episode or an Over the Garden Wall cartoon, where the stories all tie together and support a larger plot.
You can certainly be both. Gravity Falls was able to have its overarching mystery, while also having episodes that felt very self-contained and monster-of-the-week. Gravity Falls’ episodes that were self-contained were great in their own right and didn’t let their monster-of-the-week nature stop them from being entertaining, fun, and memorable.
