Call it what you will: bullet-hell hellhole, unrelenting platformer of the forever never zone, go ahead and select Simple, you baby -- and all are apt. But one more thing sums up the full Cuphead experience -- breathtaking.

And with the long-gestating DLC that has finally arrived, Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course we get just that, a game that can literally take your breath away... with anxiety.

Here's a snippet:

Sure, that might sound like Stockholm Syndrome, or as if an oversized cartoon gun were pointed at my head to say, but the truth is this is a die and retry thriller and its gated design, which teases progress, is simple and elegant and totally absorbing. It’s as Esther proclaims in that quote that opens this review, only Esther is Studio MDHR and we’re being buried by them at every opportunity for challenge, yet sucked back into the experience again and again. Beat this scene on Simple and open up the island a little more, but you can’t fulfil your actual goal here unless you beat it on Regular. That’s it, them’s the brakes, now go get good.

Click here for our Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course review.

Cuphead - The Delicious Last Course is here, the long-awaited DLC for the brilliant Cuphead. Ahead of the launch we sat down with Chad and Jared Moldenhauer of Studio MDHR to talk about its almost five-year journey, what goes into creating Cuphead's animated look, and what’s next for the team.

A snippet.

With Cuphead and The Delicious Last Course having this close relationship and love of traditional hand drawn animation from the 1930s, and the jazz music, you've also got the challenging run and gun or even bullet-hell style of videogame. It's a strange blend and mash-up, old timey animation and hardcore, challenging, gameplay from like the 1980s or 1990s. How do you marry those two things together?

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Chad Moldenhauer: A lot of it actually marries itself, beautifully too. Let me take a step back, the first thing we wanted to do was make a game that we really loved and use a style that we really loved, knowing full well that we would be working on this day in and day out. Once we started digging into the cartoons of that era, we noticed that they relied heavily on loops, had this bouncy animation, and off the wall creative ideas. A character doesn't throw a punch, their hand turns into a giant anvil and that anvil bites the other character. All of that actually pointed to merging that style of cartoon with a game like this. All of the things they used in those cartoons are similar to the things that we're using in the game.

Jared Moldenhauer: On top of that there's parallels with retro gaming. There was something about the 1980s, including movies, where it felt like any idea was open. Something like Stinger (TwinBee 2), you're flying a ship with two boxing gloves, you're fighting coat hangers and a water tap and a giant space melon. The insanity that was coming from early videogames merges with what early animation. There are no rules, your creativity is the only thing that's holding you back. Any inanimate object can be a character, including one with a cup for a head.

Also, when you played old games, you almost applied art on top of the pixels. You were looking at a pixel game, but as a child, that's not pixel Mickey Mouse, that's Mickey Mouse. For us it was, why don't we see if we can actually make a game exactly like a cartoon, where what you saw when you were younger was actually true on the screen. Of course there are a few road bumps where that much animation needs more planning, you have to be aware of how many frames an attack is or an idle cycle is because something small might be 800 frames of animation. In a retro landscape, that's a pixel squid that will slide around the screen.

Head Here For Our Full Cuphead - The Delicious Last Course Interview