This game. I have so much to say about it this might almost be like a real critic review. I have never seen a game so dedicated to the fine art of annoying the player. From the first moments of entering the game I foolishly decided to close the tutorial help screen without reading it, assuming i could get through the game on my own. However, you need to press SPACE or the SCROLL BUTTON on your mouse to open your INVENTORY. I pressed ESCAPE and it just immediately closed the game. A very nice touch. Everything about this game is annoying. The very slow gameplay, the absolute silence of the world except for the loud scribbling noises when the to-do list updates, the frustrating control layout which cannot be changed, the piss poor grammar, the bird's misused Shakespearean English, the extremely long and ultimately unnecessary dialogue, Parsnip's goose chase for cake ingredients, and his stupid little slow prancing walk. He prancercises everywhere. And possibly the most frustrating part is that we don't actually get any backstory or fulfillment on the OTHER story that took place in the background of this damn game. It's just Parsnip running around and then two very interesting and completely unexplained "where are they now" segments. I personally like ending the game by eating the whole cake myself, and hopefully if you've played the game you'll know why.
Finally someone honest. Your critic is valid with the subjective views and your downvotes are from people who are scared to be frank about the game and what they don't like about it so instead they just say positive critics that don't bother to ask the developper to improve despite the game's apparent flaws (and that's fine but it's not if these users want the game to be improved). For me, this game has a lot of flaws but it would be really cool if the dev would improve it some day because i love the characters and the fact that it's hand drawn. I'm pretty sure i'm not the only one who love video games that is animated like this and if these people like me want more games like cuphead then these users in the comments should stop being hypocrits and be honest about the game so they can have a chance to play an improved version of Parsnip if the developper learns from their critics (that is if they really want Parsnip to be improved, otherwise they can comment whatever they want).
Yeah, this was my experience as well. The adventure aspect really doesn't add anything to the game, other than doubling the runtime without improving the story or the characters. I also accidentally closed the button with Esc at some point. I just gave up and watched the ending on YouTube isntead. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I really wish the story and characters were more fleshed out, half the side characters we're just stereotypical stock characters and didn't feel like real people to me. And the horror of Parsnip being a psycho just... isn't interesting or suprising. Like it feels like the only thing this game excels at is the cute factor and the character animations. Everything else just feels incomplete to me.
The game also really sorely needs a skip dialogue option. There were 5-10 times where I accidentally started talking to the same character twice and I just had to sit there for 10-20 seconds before being allowed to move on.