Questionable Moments in Game Design: Cuphead and Accessibility

I've intentionally chosen a rather loaded title for this piece in the event that I get more than 10 clicks so I can see who's actually paid attention to what I'm talking about. Sadly, the toxicity in certain communities regarding this game makes viewing it critically a minefield at the moment.


 


 Chad and Jared Moldenhauer's Cuphead is very much a successor to games like Contra Hard Corps and Alien Soldier with 2010s design philosophy. What I mean when I say that is while those older games were grueling gauntlets with tense resource management; Cuphead is designed around each individual encounter being tackled in isolation. As a result, each individual fight can be technically tougher while the game as a whole is less mentally draining. A player can tap out any time and come back when they're ready to go again. In other words, Cuphead is clearly a game testing various skills while also aiming to be accessible to players who don't have the spare several hours it takes to learn the games that influenced it.

Accessibility has become a bit of a dirty word in computer games criticism. All too often it's associated with focus testing, homogenisation and mass market appeal. Yet, I just gave an example of Cuphead making a concession to accessibility while remaining a challenging game with a unique pace in its genre. How can that be? Let's look at a strength testing machine.

Only the finest in Wikipedia photo pilfering here.

These machines have come in various forms for nearly a century. The goal is simple: swing the hammer at the button as hard as you can and receive some form of visual feedback to score the strength of your swing. Now let's put this machine on an elevated platform reached only via stairs.

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A strength testing machine is a test of physical strength and the skill in swinging a hammer. This mainly tests arm, shoulder and core strength. However, by placing it here, it has now become inaccessible to paraplegics for reasons that have nothing to do with the test of skill and strength.

From this, there's two questions I feel anyone making a game that's serving as a test of skill two questions.

1. Which skills in particular are you aiming to test?
2. What can be done to ensure as many people as possible can take that test?

If you prioritise purity of an artist's vision over any other concern then I could see the second question being irrelevant. I don't agree with such sentiment artistically since audience response is an integral part of the dialogue that creates meaning. Nor do I agree logistically since the game we're talking about today is a commercially released product. If you're selling something, you usually want as many people to purchase it as possible. You can cater to niches, but taking extra loans to add extra content and features probably means you're after a wider than initial audience.

All that's to say that I think Cuphead was absolutely making some considerations to ensure as many people as possible could take on its tests. This in turn makes me all the more annoyed that they made an incredibly poor decision with a core mechanic: the colour of objects you can parry.

Pink. A light shade of red. There's a variety of genetic conditions that cause the human eye to have difficulty differentiating between red and green known colloquially as colour blindness. Thus, having a core mechanic that not only gives immediate rewards (negates the attack, provides 1 stock of meter) but is part of the scoring system use this colour locks anyone with colour blindness out of a potential perfect score. What adds further insult to injury is the game actually mixes the pink attack in with green ones at various times!

The use of purely a colour distinction annoys me so much because the game actually has an unlockable monochrome filter. It's clearly been implemented as a novelty rather than an accessibility improvement because this is how the previous screenshot's fight looks with it on.

It's the higher horseshoe that's pink here.

There's a number of ways the game could have resolved this red-green issue. For example:

• Put an elaborate glow effect. Recent bullet-dense scrolling shooters such as Blue Revolver and Dodonpachi Saidaioujou did this and it was considered an improvement by players.
• Place a distinct border around the object. Bold lines, extra shading, something to make it pop out and look desirable.
• Place a universal symbol for parrying on any object with the attribute.
• Use a blue or yellow colour instead. You're still gating out those with blue/yellow or total colour blindness but it's a far smaller piece of the population.

There's a number of times that I feel the game was aiming to obfuscate whether you can parry something. All of the above suggestions could be implement while still allowing the designer to mixup players. I don't really think it's necessary to do so since the parry move itself has absolutely zero utility outside of interacting with the correct objects. I had the most enjoyable engagements when I could clearly see what I want to parry but the path to it was obstructed by hazards.

So there you have it. Cuphead is an enjoyable, challenging game that does a good job of making itself accessible to those short on time, yet needlessly infuriating for others who have no need to be gated out. I hope that whatever the future holds for the Moldenhauers and Studio MDHR that this is a consideration they'll take on board in the future.