Best Character Designs In Cuphead And The Delicious Last Course

Recently, Studio MDHR decided that gamers hadn't suffered enough at their malicious, meticulous hands, so they pumped their famous boss rush property with even more reasons to chuck your switch across the room! That's right, Cuphead now has DLC -- also known as The Delicious Last Course, which is probably the only clever play on that horrible acronym to exist.

Bone-chilling rage aside, Cuphead is an incredible game, not the least because of the loving character designs, which harken back to an era long before most of us were even breathing. But hey! We're breathing now, so we can talk about them! Here are our picks for the best designs that Cuphead has to offer.

The Delicious Last Course has character designs that are featured in this article, and these characters' respective story beats are also touched upon. Since it's still relatively new at the time of writing, consider this your official spoiler warning for the Cuphead DLC.

10 Cuphead And Mugman

These guys are here more in a perfunctory capacity than through any true measure of grand quality. Please don't misunderstand, Cuphead and Mugman are solid designs that serve both as unique IP and as a clever parody of Disney's immortal mouse. It's simply that there are other, more interesting designs in Studio MDHR's product that could benefit from more media exposure.

But for now, let's give a hand to our protagonist and his slightly less popular brother. While we're here, can anyone explain how these two keep the liquid in their heads while they're running around? 'Cus we're stumped.

9 Baroness Von Bon Bon

For anyone who wondered what it might be like to throw hands with the entire cast of Candyland, there's Baroness Von Bon Bon, the sugar-coated killer who has absolutely no qualms with sending her subjects into battle. She looks like Princess Bubblegum's evil auntie and, if she could speak outside of the rhyming couplets that are attached to the death screen, she'd probably sound like Princess Bubblegum's evil auntie, too, cigarette-scratched vocal cords and all.

From the word "fight," her design is clean, and the entire aesthetic just clicks. Of course, as we've already referenced two other pieces of similar popular media, this could just be a severe case of selection bias. Even if that's the case, cue the Def Leppard music!

8 Mortimer Freeze

It is a simple truth pivotal to the universe's continued stability that all individuals born with the name Mortimer are fated to be villains, and good ol' Mortimer Freeze is no exception. Not to overdo the Adventure Time references, but this guy is really giving Ice King vibes in all the best way, although he does seem to prefer whales to penguins. They're probably better at the whole murder thing.

All Cuphead bosses play fast and loose with the laws of physics, but Mortimer's snow manipulation powers really lend themselves to the rubber hose style that Cuphead is drawn in. Whether he's assaulting the player with loose, haunted ice cubes from his snow fridge's freezer or sending shockwaves from his disembodied eyeball, Mortimer Freeze is, well, not exactly a delightful design, but an incredibly compelling one.

7 Hilda Berg

Anyone active on Tik Tok will understand the unmitigable disasters that await those who are foolish enough to incur an astrology girl's wrath. For Cuphead, that girl is Hilda Berg, and she is deadly. It doesn't help that she's the first flying level that players will have to reckon with, so there's an added learning curve to an already difficult boss fight, which features an ever-changing roulette of battle phases based on the zodiac.

Perhaps fittingly, in her final form, Hilda morphs into a giant, steampunk mecha moon, which is one of the sentences that will go down in history as the biggest "...why, though?" of all time. The only question we're genuinely accepting, however, is why she starts out as a zeppelin. Seriously, anyone?

6 The King's Leap (Pawns, Knight, Bishop, Rook, Queen)

Cuphead Chess fights with Knight, Queen, and Rook

Chess is one of those games that will outlast us all, no matter how many times we get relentlessly teased for loving it (so... so many times). Possibly not boosting its street cred, Cuphead features an entire series of chess-themed boss challenges. Players can work their way through a swarm of Pawns, a clumsy Knight, a zealous Bishop, a frumpy Rook (that's the castle guy), and a destructive queen.

These fights are totally optional but, honestly, who would intentionally avoid an ideal conversation starter to use for a hopeful, eventual meet-cute with Anya Taylor-Joy? Now that's a 4-D chess strat.

5 Chef Saltbaker

Low and behold, The Delicious Last Course shocked gamers (us, at least) by turning the seemingly chipper Chef Saltbaker, who offered his magical cooking skills to help Ms. Chalice get over the whole being dead thing, into a ruthless, soul-stealing murderer. Before now, salt shakers have only seen solid representation in Blue's Clues, but now, well, maybe they'd rather go back a few decades.

So he's not a great guy... but never has an inanimate object looked so objectively evil before, and that's objectively pretty darn cool. Saltbaker really hits his stride when Cuphead/Mugman/Chalice shatter his glass shell (read: his skin, they rip his skin to pieces) and scatter his precious sodium all over his cooking dungeon. For anyone not made out of sentient salt granules, that would be a death knell, but for monsters in the same vein as the Kool-Aid Man, it's only the beginning.

4 Esther Winchester

Studio MDHR did Esther Winchester dirty. That poor sheriff was just doing her dang job until players flew an airplane into their saloon. Maybe she's a corrupt law official, that's not our right to say, but we can that the abuse she's put through during her boss fight is the kind of anti-cow behavior that the Chik-Fil-A cows have been protesting for years.

Don't know what we're talking about? Esther gets sucked through a grinder, then cooked into sausage links in real-time during the fight. She somehow retains her sentience to continue her assault, even during her final form, which shows her trapped inside a metal tin. Okay, genuinely, though? This design is equal parts horrific, hilarious, and unequivocally unforgettable.

3 Grim Matchstick

Every game needs a good dragon. A bad dragon? Whichever, they just need a dragon, and players need to be able to fight that sucker. Grim Matchstick is an adorable fire-breathing monster who, if our interpretation of the stage's background is correct, was just minding his own territory until Cuphead et al. stormed in with a deadly vendetta.

The rubber hose stylings of Cuphead make Grim feel more snakelike than dragonlike at points, but he makes up for it by growing a couple of extra heads for his final form, and nothing screams "DRAGON" quite like shoving too many brains into the same poor, scaly body.

2 Angel And Demon

Studio MDHR was either playing a lot of Elden Ring or Kingdom Hearts while building The Last Delicious Course. Aside from featuring an entire line of optional bosses, they also built in a secret one. Angel and Demon are a battling duo in which players have unique agency as to where the danger comes from. The whole event is framed as a dream, but it feels more like a nightmare.

What makes this pairing so visually compelling is how they're tied together by the looming skeleton of the Devil. Those hollow sockets stare without feeling while players scramble to dodge pillars of fire. It's a lot to take in, but it's an excellent callback to the base game's final boss.

1 Werner Werman

Look, we're not beholden to anyone here. This is an entirely subjective list, and any boss could go anywhere, and it wouldn't matter because it's all opinion-based. That being said... this is officially a Werner stan site. Werner Werman is what happens when Jerry gets sick of Tom's crap and goes on the warpath. And Werner does this with a level of deadly ingenuity that would make Kevin McCallister proud. When players fight him, Werner is driving a tank made out of a soup can. Here in the business, that's legally considered metal as hell.

There's an entire system of traps laid into the walls of Werner's home that players have to avoid, and in the final moments after the cat is (spoilers) killed, it's revealed that Werner has already done him in, gutted him, and replaced his organic innards with gears and bolts so that he functions as an itty bitty teeny tiny gundam. We'll say it again, Werner Werman is the king of Cuphead.

NEXT: Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course: How To Access The DLC