Cuphead: New Heart Ring Charm Guide (“The Delicious Last Course” DLC)

This guide is currently being written on the 1st of July, 2022 on the current, launch day patch of the Delicious Last Course. As what I’m talking about could be classed as an exploit and/or is unintended behaviour, this guide could become outdated if a new update is released. I’ll try to keep this guide updated in case that does occur.

Here’s the basics of this charm. the Heart Ring is a charm you can purchase as early as your first visit to Porkrind’s shop, if you talk to the Papercat next to Chef Saltbaker’s bakery.

It’s effect is thus:

A useful item, since it’s basically the cooler Twin Heart charm. You don’t even get a damage penalty for it! I thought this was very handy for the main game but as I was getting ready to S-Rank all of the bosses, I wasn’t sure if this item would prove useful since those are normally no hit runs.

..Right?

Be mindful, as now we’re gonna get into some weird programming and math territory here.

Firstly, we need to have a look at this:

This is the HP-Bonus section of the tally at the end of a fight. Prior to the DLC, it was a simple counter that measured how many times you had gotten hit. This naturally meant that completing A+-Rank and S-Rank fights in the game required not getting hit at all by the boss.

That was, until the DLC. Now that the Heart Ring has been introduced, the counter has to manage players gaining and losing health throughout the fight. The way it copes with this, in particular, is interesting for those of us that are trying to perfect the game.

The counter works off of a value that is set when the game loads into a boss fight, lets call this Beginning value B. ‘Cause it’s funny. This counter is set to the player’s default health when loading into a boss (3 by default, 4 with Heart, 5 with Twin Hearts, 9 with Game Djimmi) and ticks down as the player’s health goes down. So far so good.

This starts to fall apart once the Ring comes into play, however.

Loading into a fight, a player with the Heart Ring has their health set to 3 by default. So B=3. They parry slap a pink object, and their HP is now 1 higher. But B doesn’t account for that. So we have HP at 4 and B at 3. What happens when we take a hit?

The game doesn’t decrement B! I assume this must be cause it’s set to go down when HP=B, which it isn’t in this case. This also helps explain why it doesn’t work when done in the opposite direction: If you take a hit and then parry something to gain 1 HP, the game doesn’t increment B. It’s also this curious behaviour that makes me wonder if this is an unintended effect, but who knows for sure until they do end up patching it out.