Enchanted Portals is a Cuphead-esc game made by Xixo Games Studio, a Spanish company of 2, named Daniel and Gemma. Cuphead, developed by HTML Studios, is a boss rush style game where you play as living cups and shoot magic beams at monsters to collect their souls.

Enchanted Portals has received a ton of backlash from the media, having the look and gameplay feel very similar to Cuphead, being a boss rush style game where you shoot magic.

They have responded to this criticism on Facebook, where they have 8.6 thousand followers, saying the following: ‘we’ve been listening closely to the criticism and we agree that having more elements that further differentiate ourselves from Cuphead would greatly benefit the game, so from now on we’ll work towards adding some more original gameplay mechanics… …as many other unique elements as possible.’

A few unique ideas they’ve already had is a shield bubble, status effects, and possibly an element system they’ve talked with fans about. Xixo is also going for random boss ideas, instead of sticking to one theme. Some bosses look very unique, fighting a Beethoven inspired character while inside of his piano, a fight against the Princess and the Frog, and even one against Cerberus, the 3-headed dog of the underworld.

Some ideas are very similar to Cuphead, being the animation of the main characters attacking, the Cow boss in it’s robotic faze, being almost a carbon copy of the Dr. Kahl’s Robot fight, and the Witch fight looking a lot Hilda Berg in her final form of the battle.

The art style is one of the big controversies I’ve seen. It’s in the old Mickey Mouse and Felix the Cat cartoon styles, and it appears hand-drawn. However it is actually digitally drawn, but it is drawn frame by frame to have the same feel. 

The game does seem very similar to Cuphead in many ways but it also looks like it has some its own legs to stand on. I am very excited to see where this project goes, and I think it’ll turn out amazing!