Cuphead is not what it seems

WARNING DISTURBING

So, just this past Wednesday, I was delighted to discover that the new game Cuphead had released. I had been anticipating it for quite a while and it's existence had slipped my mind. I had recently been at a friends house and saw him play it on his XBox One for a moment, but I never got the opportunity to play it myself. I'm not proud to admit it, but I didn't want to spend money on the game. Normally I do try to purchase indie games to support the developers, but I had recently made a purchase to repair my cars transmission, so I was low on cash.

I wasn't entirely familiar with how to pirate video games, my friend's older brother had told me how to do it before, but I didn't recall the website he had shown me. I knew it was something like "black skull games", so that's what i googled. I clicked the first site that wasn't an ad and was greeted with a page that looked straight out of the early 1990 days of the internet, or worse, the Dark Web.

The stark black page contained only three things. A search bar, arial text displaying the name of the page; Skull Black Gaming. And an image of a real skull that had been spray painted black. Clearly taken with a digital camera circa 2006, it it was unsettling to think someones actual skeleton had been defaced like that.

However it was possible it could've been a fake, so I brushed it off and began to search. "Cuphead" I typed into the search bar, and quickly pressed the enter key, impatiently wanting to play the game. The first and only result was text displaying "CUPHEAD \* \* \* EARLY COPY 2015" I was stunned. This wasn't the newest most polished copy of the game, but it was a rare opportunity to play an older version of a game that had been in development for a long time. Not only that, but 2015 was when I had been most interested in the games development, it appeared as though the file had been uploaded to the site that very year. If only I had known at the time I could've been playing it years before everyone else. I quickly hit the download button and it instantly appeared in my download box. "cuphead.exe" I double clicked it and was shocked to hear the blaring alarm from my antivirus software. I quickly turned it off, as I knew pirated games often set off the software, as my friends brother had told me.

The game began loading and I was greeted with the logo of the games company, MGTK. Then, the opening cutscene began. I was delighted to see the old timey animation, and the smiling faces of Cuphead and his friend Mugman. However, there appeared to be no prompt to continue, and I quickly began hitting every key on the keyboard to proceed. Minutes passed and I became distressed, but then I glanced up towards the screen and noticed something had changed. Cuphead was no longer bobbing up and down as was his normal looping animation. He was standing completely still, but not as though the games animation had froze. He was swaying, and I could see his chest rise and fall in an eerily realistic fastion. He stared directly at the screen, almost as though he was looking through it and directly at me.

"Thats . . . weird . . . " I said, under my breath, trying to brush it off and look for a controller. Perhaps that's what the issue was, I needed a controller to continue the game. I stood up from my seat and began searching for one, but as I walked away from the screen, something changed. The music had stopped, and when I turned back, Mugman was gone, only Cuphead remained, standing in the middle of the screen, staring directly at me.

"What the Hell ?" I said, slowly approaching the screen, ready to hit the escape key. Slowly he began lowering his head, and I mashed the escape not wanting to see what would come next. However, the escape key didn't work. Neither did ctrl alt delete.

He tilted his head down far enough to reveal what his cup truly contained. Steeped in liquid was none other than a harlequin fetus. Bloated, pink, leprous, suppurating pus and vomit. It's mouth opening and closing with the tide of the jostled liquid in the cup. I gasped, disgusted by what I saw on the screen before me. The fetuses vestigial arm-fins flapping ineffectually in the liquid.

Its head kept it buoyant, for it was bloated beyond any proportional logic. Its skin is lustrous--I wasn't sure if it was from the broth, or from the murky afterbirth pooled at its shiny flanks, a severed umbilicus draped over the edge of the Cupheads head, frayed like a dry rope. There's a dent atop the fetus's skull. soft, pushed inward, pressure assaulting an already malformed and undersized brain. Its eyes are blasted over with cataracts. two unnerving blue orbs sunken into a malleable and uncannily almost-human visage. As I backed up, Cupheads eyes began rolling back in his cup head, and he smiled. Almost as though he was happy to see what he carried in his cup this entire time. I quickly ran to my computers power chord and pulled, the screen flashing to an eerie blank screen. I collapsed to the ground, crying from what I had just seen. Was this truly an early copy of the game, did the developers put this in there? It looked to realistic to be drawn, or even be a 3D model. Whatever the reason was, or whatever the source, I couldn't bear to see any images of gameplay of the new Cuphead, for I and only I truly knew the dark secret that resided inside.