These are the two best-looking 2D games you can buy for around twenty dollars, they are both hand-animated by people who clearly loved doing it, and they will give you completely different weeks. Rayman Legends is enormous, generous and joyful. Cuphead is a boss-rush that expects you to fail dozens of times before it lets you past.
Buying the wrong one for your household is easy, because the art style of both suggests "family game" and only one of them is. Below is the honest head-to-head on difficulty, length, co-op and value. Both sit on our cheap platformers list.
The head-to-head
Difficulty: the thing that decides it
Cuphead is hard on purpose. It is built around memorizing boss patterns and executing them cleanly, and you will see the retry screen a great many times before each victory. That loop is exhilarating if you enjoy mastery and miserable if you do not. Nothing about the cheerful 1930s cartoon presentation softens it.
Rayman Legends is challenging in places but fundamentally generous: checkpoints are frequent, the early levels are gentle, and the hardest content is optional. A child can play the first half of Rayman happily. A child will not get past Cuphead's second boss.
How much game you get
Rayman Legends is much the larger package. The Definitive Edition contains well over a hundred levels, including remastered stages from the previous game, plus daily challenge content and the famous rhythm levels that most people remember it for. Cuphead is a focused boss-rush of around ten to fifteen hours depending on how quickly it clicks, with a paid expansion available separately.
On raw hours-per-dollar Rayman wins comfortably. On intensity-per-hour Cuphead does, and some people would rather have twelve unforgettable hours than sixty pleasant ones.
Co-op
Both are local-only, which matters if your play partner is not in the room. Rayman Legends supports up to four players on one screen and is genuinely brilliant that way — chaotic, forgiving, and one of the best couch games on the platform. Cuphead is two-player local, and a second player makes it easier in some ways and considerably more chaotic in others.
For a family or a group, Rayman is the obvious pick. For one determined pair, Cuphead is a brilliant shared obsession.
Art and music
A tie, in different directions. Cuphead's hand-inked 1930s animation and jazz score are a genuine technical achievement and unlike anything else in games. Rayman's painterly worlds and its music levels — where the whole stage moves in time with the soundtrack — are the most purely delightful moments in either game.
Price and value
They trade within a few dollars of each other and both discount regularly. Rayman's Definitive Edition includes everything; Cuphead's expansion is a separate purchase, so factor that in if you intend to see all of it.
The verdict: which should you buy?
Buy Rayman Legends if there is any chance of children, casual players or four people on a sofa being involved, or if you simply want the most content for the money. It is one of the great value packages in gaming and almost nobody dislikes it.
Buy Cuphead if you want to be tested, if you have enjoyed hard games before, and if the animation alone is worth the price of admission to you. It is shorter and harsher, and for the right player it is the more memorable of the two.
If you want the hard-but-fair experience without the boss-rush structure, Cuphead vs Celeste is the comparison that settles that one.
