Almost five whole years following its initial release date, Cuphead is finally bound to get its huge DLC with the upcoming launch of The Delicious Last Course expansion pack. Featuring a new playable character, new bosses, new weapons, and more, this DLC also marks the end of the game’s lengthy development cycle.

Maya Moldenhauer, the Studio Director and Executive Producer of StudioMDHR, the team behind Cuphead, recently participated in an interview where she discussed the Cuphead IP and its future after The Delicious Last Course comes out. Moldenhauer also dropped a few hints on the nature of StudioMDHR’s next project, though she did keep them rather vague on purpose.

According to Moldenhauer’s commentary, The Delicious Last Course DLC is, in fact, a collection of virtually all the ideas StudioMDHR still had after Cuphead had already come out. Taken from the cutting room floor, these concepts and features were then improved upon and implemented into the game after getting an extra round of polishing. The Delicious Last Course‘s gameplay reflects this, too, as much of what has already been shown looks and feels like a proper expansion to the core Cuphead experience.

Now that Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course has gone gold, StudioMDHR can finally start thinking ahead and conceptualize its next project. According to Moldenhauer, “The sky is the limit,” and the studio’s next game is seemingly highly unlikely to have anything to do with Cuphead itself. Moldenhauer did admit, however, that the team has a penchant for 2D animation and pencil-to-paper artwork, so the visual DNA is bound to remain the same no matter what premise it ends up settling on.

It took a good long while for StudioMDHR to finish both Cuphead and its upcoming DLC, so it’s likely that the next game will have a longer turnaround cycle as well. Cuphead‘s been remarkably successful since its inception, though, with this relatively small IP getting a fully fledged Cuphead Arby’s Kids Meal toy lineup. With that in mind, StudioMDHR is sure to have the overhead it needs to keep trucking along for as long as it takes.

While Moldenhauer all but confirmed that StudioMDHR’s next game will have a similarly striking visual style, there’s another major aspect of Cuphead that wouldn’t be out of place in the developer’s next project: the difficulty. Namely, Cuphead is one of the most difficult games on the market right now, and StudioMDHR could very well be interested in retaining this approach to gameplay for the future, too.

Cuphead: The Delicious Last Course will launch for PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One on June 30, 2022.

Source: IGN