When I first saw that Enchanted Portals existed, I was slightly intrigued since the art style was very similar to Cuphead’s iconic designs. It is so prevalent that many people go about simply calling this game “The Cuphead Clone.” To say that Enchanted Portals is a Cuphead Clone is somewhat accurate.

The art style that exists within Cuphead is heavily emulated within Enchanted Portals to the point where if you put the art side by side, it would be occasionally difficult to tell the difference between the two. The problem that I have with calling Enchanted Portals a Cuphead Clone is that it does a very poor job of copying everything that makes Cuphead unique.

Enchanted Portals is a game developed and published by Xixo Games Studio. This studio consists of just two developers hailing from Spain who used Kickstarter to fund the overall development of the game with a goal of €120,000 (roughly $127,000). While they failed to reach that goal, they still pushed on ahead with the money that they did have and began production in 2020.

Roughly three years later they have released Enchanted Portals on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and will soon be released on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. This clearly has been quite a task to complete with only two developers considering that Studio MDHR had around twelve developers who worked on Cuphead and used about the same amount of time to get that game running.

In order to talk about Enchanted Portals‘ gameplay, I believe that it is appropriate to first discuss the part of the game that has caught the attention of so many people: the art style. As previously stated, the art style is very similar to that of Cuphead. While the developers made their own unique creatures and characters to inhabit the world, there is no doubt that the stylization of these characters takes cues from the same early cartoon style that Cuphead attempted to capture.

This art style seems to be the main factor as to why many people are comparing this game so heavily to Cuphead, including yours truly. While many may bash them for this, I personally think that they have made the creatures and characters unique enough to not be deemed an entire rip-off of the Cuphead designs. Instead, I think it would be more appropriate to say that they were inspired by the aesthetic of Cuphead. However, I can not be sure since I have not personally spoken to either developer on that subject.

There are two aspects of Enchanted Portals where it falls flat on its face: sound design and gameplay. The sound design is very strange as many enemies will have either one sound that plays with them from time to time or no sounds at all. Considering that this is a game that relies on players being able to know when the enemy is about to attack, this can make things extremely difficult.

On top of this, there is not much variation when it comes to the music in the game. The songs that are there tend to loop often, especially during the boss fights that can take forever to beat within one life. The music also doesn’t blend well with the tone that the art direction is giving in the various levels which I found to be jarring. 

While the gameplay suffers a bit from the sound design, there are also problems with the controls that seem to be nonsensical. Aiming, which is one of the key aspects of surviving, doesn’t appear to be as responsive as it should be. There are also plenty of dead spaces where can easily dodge your fire. These spaces have caused me to use rather odd strategies in order to actually hit the enemy. Another thing that threw me off was the fact that there are three spells that you can select, with certain enemies only being able to be killed by certain spells.

The initial way of switching between these spells was not very intuitive and not explained well in the tutorial level. However, the developers have recently made it so that the spells can be changed in an easier fashion. The one thing that the developers didn’t have in the initial release, but have added in a recent update are health points that defeated enemies will drop if you are injured.

The health drops certainly make things easier on certain levels. Sadly, it seems like the gaming equivalent of putting a bandage over a bullet hole. If you are looking for any other games with a throwback aesthetic, I would suggest checking out Edward Harding’s update on the upcoming Wallace and Gromit game right here.

A PC review copy of Enchanted Portals was provided by Xixo Games Studio for this review.

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Enchanted Portals

19.99

3.5

Score

3.5/10

Pros

• Tried and True Art Style

Cons

• Janky Controls
• Bad Sound Design
• Poor Tutorial