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Cuphead is full of boss battles, and every single one of them is a test of endurance. Making the fights that much tougher is the fact that you won’t see any health bars for the bosses. According to the dev team behind Cuphead, this was a very deliberate decision.

In an interview with EDGE magazine, Co-director Chad Moldenhauer shared multiple reasons why boss battles keep you in the dark on the boss’ health.

“None of our early mockups using them ever felt right in the context of what we were striving for: to make Cuphead feel like a real playable cartoon from the 1930s. And design-wise, we also felt like including health bars might risk teaching players the wrong thing: pushing them to optimize meticulously for ideal DPS [damage per second] or even leading to them missing key visual cues for attacks or projectiles as they glanced at the boss health bar.”

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Comments (4)

laiceaterna

1+ y ago

I don't like this, simply because when I fail beating a boss, I want to know exactly how good or bad I performed, and if I need to practice a lot or only need to become a little bit better.


When you fail at a bosse in Cuphead you get to see a progress bar with at wich point you died so you can see that as sort of a healt bar which also tells how you performed.


mereel

1+ y ago

I’ve patiently waited years to play this until I could get the physical on switch. Dec 6th. Here… we… come!


sligeach_eire

1+ y ago

A health bar that can be toggled on and off seems like it would be a logical and reasonable compromise.

Edited 1 time