The rubber hose style keeps finding new corners of gaming to colonize and honestly I'm not mad about it. MSN reports on Moylo, an upcoming game that blends hand-drawn, frame-by-frame rubber hose cartoon animation with dark-fantasy melee combat and metroidvania exploration.

If you played Cuphead, you know the drill on the animation side. Everything is drawn in that 1930s bendy-limbed style, where arms noodle around like they don't have bones and every hit squashes and stretches like a slapstick short. Moylo is committing to the full frame-by-frame approach, which is the expensive, painful, gorgeous way of doing it. No shortcuts here. Every attack animation is being inked by hand.

The twist is what's underneath. Cuphead was a run-and-gun with boss rushes. MOUSE went the retro FPS route, black and white and packing heat. Moylo goes melee-first, with dark-fantasy combat that reads more like a character action game, wrapped in a metroidvania structure where new abilities open up new paths. So the loop isn't "look at the pretty cartoon, dodge, shoot." It's learn the weapon, unlock the movement, come back to that sealed door you walked past an hour ago.

That combo clicks for me. Metroidvanias live and die on movement feeling good, and rubber hose animation is basically movement distilled into art form. When your character's limbs can bend anywhere, a dash or a grapple or a heavy slash has room to be expressive in a way rigid 3D models can't touch. Hollow Knight understood this on the 2D side. Moylo looks ready to push it further.

The dark-fantasy framing is the interesting seasoning. Cuphead leaned whimsical-sinister, devils and carrot generals. Moylo sounds like it's going genuinely grim under the ink, which could be a great contrast, cutesy blobs of ink carrying real menace. Or it could clash. The tone tightrope is real with this style, and the animation team's range will decide which way it lands.

No release date yet, and the report doesn't name a platform slate, so this one goes on the watchlist rather than the calendar. With the fall absolutely buried under GTA 6 and everything else scrambling for 2027 lanes, an indie like this has every reason to take its time anyway.

I'll be following this one. Hand-drawn games are the closest thing gaming has to a craft revival, and every studio that survives the frame-by-frame grind makes it easier for the next one to try. And if you've got a soft spot for Cuphead's animation or Hollow Knight's map design, keep an eye on Moylo. What's the last hand-drawn game that got you?