Xixo Games Studio, a two person operation centered in Spain, announced a Kickstarter campaign for its upcoming game titled Enchanted Portals earlier this month. Now, in a post on the game's official Facebook page, the studio has announced that it will be delaying the Kickstarter campaign indefinitely due to negotiations with a prospective publisher.
When the studio released the campaign reveal trailer, many users took to their favorite social media outlets to speak out about how Enchanted Portals seems to resemble Cuphead, causing the two year old game to trend on Twitter once again. However, while the game is still processing the backfire coming from claims of being overly similar to it's predecessor, Xixo may be also be turning their focus from crowdsourcing to a private publisher.
The Facebook post details that Xixo is in the middle of negotiations with an unnamed publisher that might be able to fund Enchanted Portals without the need for a Kickstarter campaign. This could mean that Xixo can instead focus solely on development as opposed to splitting its attention between the game and the Kickstarter rewards that would have come with the campaign. As a result, the Enchanted Portals campaign has been delayed indefinitely, pending negotiation results to determine if the crowdsourcing will even be necessary.
In other recent posts, regarding the backlash, Xixo has attempted to address the Cuphead controversy, claiming that the similarities are due to Enchanted Portals being so heavily inspired by it, as opposed to being an attempted clone or competitor to the game. When the Kickstarter campaign first closed, many assumed that it was due to the outrage at the game's similarities, but it would seem that the attention the game received as a result of the controversy may have garnered the interest of a publisher. That, however, doesn't mean that players aren't still poking fun at the connections between the two games.
Clones and "like" games are common enough in gaming that Steam even has its own "Souls-like" category tag to describe games that are so similar to their inspiration that players easily recognize them within their own internal genre. Since Cuphead released two years ago, there haven't been many boss-rush, shoot 'em ups that have released since, and the game displayed that there is a healthy demand for more within the genre. So a game like Enchanted Portals could easily be a welcome addition for players looking for more Cuphead-like content while they wait for StudioMDHR to finally announce its next big project.
Source: Facebook (via Nintendo Life)