I am intrigued by the look of this game. This might be one of the very few indie platformers I buy.
I finished reading Jim Henson’s biography recently and it is interesting seeing the juxtaposition between him and comments like this (which are typical sentiment of indie developers). Henson loved the ‘Old Hollywood’ style and tried to bring that element to a lot of his movies but for him it was a lot more about the spirit of what the old Hollywood movies were than replicating their physical characteristics. As a content creator he was constantly pushing the technology and art of puppetry forward in every way he could while focusing more on the spirit of what made the classic Hollywood films great (big musical numbers, larger than life characters, grand adventure). It seems like so many of these indie developers look backwards and try and place these artificial technical restrictions on their projects as if they were still in school trying to impress a professor rather than creating something of their own. I think the distance I feel towards most indie games is for this reason, it is like paying homage to NES platformers means you have to use adopt the limitations of the NES system.
In Cuphead I think this will come out in the same way, they will adopt everything about classic cartoons as if Walt Disney would approach his craft exactly the same way with modern technology (saloon piano music in the background, wiz-bang-kapow sound effects, etc). I’m not saying that won’t be enjoyable, I just think there is a smarter way to go about these things than wholesale coping a period’s style because with access to better technology the period’s defining creators wouldn’t have made the same decisions.
I think that's partially because Microsoft jumped in and poured a lot more development budget into the game. Hence there's more platforming in the game now than there was originally going to be.
