This Cuphead Clone Is Causing An Uproar

Let us introduce you to Enchanted Portals, the newest game from the team at Xixo Games Studio. It claims to draw inspiration from Cuphead...but maybe it draws a little TOO much inspiration. Enchanted Portals appears to have an original enough story. Two children decide to experiment with magic and get a little more than they bargained for, as they're sucked through an "enchanted portal" into a strange new world filled with frog-kissing princesses and mecha-cows.

From there, though, things become decidedly more Cuphead, as the game's trailer illustrates. Enchanted Portals appears to be a part of the same "bullet hell" platformer genre as Studio MDHR's 2017 hit, requiring the same quick reflexes in order to survive its levels and bosses.

The game's art style is also clearly inspired by Cuphead, borrowing that title's 1930s cartoon aesthetic and its whimsical animations. Even if you've never played Cuphead yourself, you almost certainly know what it looks like. You've at least heard about the game's hand-drawn animation, or its jazzy big band soundtrack.

You may even know the team at Studio MDHR spent years getting the art of Cuphead just right; years ensuring the game played and looked like nothing else around. For what it's worth, the developers of Enchanted Portals aren't totally blind to the comparisons, with one of the artists on the game telling Polygon: "Yes, of course Cuphead was a huge inspiration for Enchanted Portals.

We’re both avid fans and we wanted to make something similar, but always from a place of respect and admiration for the original." The question is, where do you draw the line between inspiration and straight-up copying the work of others? If you ask many of those commenting on the game's trailer on YouTube, Enchanted Portals is far more on the "ripoff" side of things.

One commenter joked: "I Can't Believe it's Not Cuphead!" Even those with praise to share about the game's art and animation couldn't help but admit that the game looked a little too much like Cuphead. One person on YouTube wrote: "This is a pretty competent looking bootleg." Another added in a positive note by writing: "Well, you get no points for originality, but I'd say it still has as much charm as Cuphead and I appreciate the effort." So where is Enchanted Portals at currently? As far as we're able to tell, the game has not yet finished development.

In fact, the studio actually plans to launch a Kickstarter to help fund and ultimately finish work on Enchanted Portals. That Kickstarter goes live on Oct.
24, so if you're able to see the project as something more than a plagiarized version of Cuphead, you should be able to lend your support to Enchanted Portals on that date.

This whole episode does raise an interesting question, though: why did it take so long for someone to draw inspiration from Cuphead? The game is downright gorgeous, and the way Studio MDHR managed to weave its animation into that bullet hell gameplay is extremely impressive.

You might recall we asked the same question about The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild when the suspiciously similar-looking Genshin Impact arrived on the scene. And sure, Genshin Impact goes a little too far with its "inspiration," just as Enchanted Portals does with its Cuphead influence.

But why don't we have more games attempting to do what Breath of the Wild and Cuphead did for their respective genres? We don't want them to look like full-on copies, but how about releasing games with unique spins that try to push those formulas forward a little bit? We'll always be down to play a Zelda-like or a Cuphead-like.

We just don't want to feel like we're playing the store brand knock-offs of the originals when we load them up. We'll be sure to share more with you on Enchanted Portals as the game's Kickstarter campaign progresses. In the meantime, we'll cross our fingers and hope that the game changes something in order to look a little less like Cuphead.