Cuphead

Cuphead is a visually utterly unique run-and-gun platformer from the Canadian brother duo Chad and Jared Moldenhauer, whose entire graphics were hand-drawn and animated using the same process as the rubber-hose cartoon grotesques of the 1930s, including watercolor backgrounds and a live-recorded jazz score. The story, in the spirit of period cartoons, follows the brothers Cuphead and Mugman, who lost a bet with the Devil and must collect debts for him from a colorful roster of bosses scattered across an island map, which the player navigates in a simple top-down view similar to classic platformers.

At the core of the gameplay are intense boss battles against giant enemies with multiple transformation phases, requiring precise memorization of attack patterns, perfect timing of parries on pink-colored objects, and strategic selection of weapons, super moves, and charms before each attempt. The game is renowned for its extremely high yet fair difficulty, where every failure stems from a player's mistake rather than chance, placing it alongside classic arcade bullet-hell titles. Besides the boss fights, it also offers classic run-and-gun platforming levels, and it can be played from the start by two people in local co-op, though the screen becomes even more chaotic that way.

Development took nearly seven years, and its hand-drawn animation process was enormously labor-intensive, which is reflected in a unique atmosphere unmatched by any other title, where every frame looks like a cel from an old film reel. Cuphead became a commercial and critical phenomenon and one of the most striking indie games of the entire generation; it was later released on other platforms as well and got its own animated series. The later The Delicious Last Course expansion added a new playable character, Ms. Chalice, along with another set of inventive bosses that expand the otherwise compact but immensely dense content of the base game.