In the US, "Spin" stated that "no disco was ever this sublime" and that Green's mixture of pop music and intellectualism "benefits us by teaching us the vocabulary of emotion. Green's gilded, fabricated palace of sentiment makes you want to know more about these matters even as his clever-dick wordplay, woozy vocals and slick manipulation of modern dance music's subtlest syncopations lead you onto some empty dance floor of the soul." Writing for "The Village Voice", critic Robert Christgau wrote that "the high-relief production and birdlike tunes and spry little keyb arrangements and hippety-hoppety beat and archly ethereal falsetto add up to a music of amazing lightness and wit that's saved from any hint of triviality by wordplay whose delight in its own turns is hard to resist." "Rolling Stone" was cooler towards the record, acknowledging that Scritti Politti's new direction worked well on "Wood Beez" and "Absolute", but that "the rest of "Cupid & Psyche 85" isn't deviant enough. Green has absorbed the lessons of dance masters like Arif Mardin so well that he often imitates the very formulas he seeks to undermine... Stylishly wrought, at times delightfully eccentric, "Cupid & Psyche 85" is ultimately too true to its form to be genuinely subversive." In a retrospective review, AllMusic called the album "a state-of-the-art, immaculately constructed set of catchy synth pop."