Gameplay Journal Entry #9

The “art” game I decided to play is Cuphead. The way Cuphead works is that you play as the people who have cups for heads and you walk around a map like Mario and then you enter stages. Some stages are only boss fights and some are run n guns. Run n Guns are stages where you have to run through an area and shoot enemies and collect coins to reach the end of the area. And the animations are all hand drawn and flow really well.

“Critical play means to create or occupy play environments and activities that represent one or more questions about aspects of human life. These questions can be abstract, such as rethinking cooperation, or winning, or losing; or concrete, involved with content issues such as looking at the U.S. military actions in Cambodia in the early 1970s.” (Flanagan, 4) Cuphead manages to do this by using its art style to tell a story about gambling and dealing with the devil. The mechanics of the game are to run and shoot some of these bosses which you need to kill to collect their souls and give them to the devil. This makes players want to do these actions just to save themselves without caring about the other things that they are killing and taking their souls. They make the players do this because they do not want to lose.

Flanagan, Mary. Critical Play: Radical Game Design. The MIT Press, 2013.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnIXQqldC7o&ab_channel=ZackScottGames