Evil Twin: Cyprien's Chronicles, what happened to it?

What happened to them ... is a regular column that tries to bring to light those franchises that for one reason or another have fallen into oblivion, telling their story, with the hope of seeing them again sooner or later on our screens.

Evil Twin: Cyprien's Chronicles is a 3D platformer released by Ubisoft in 2001 on PlayStation 2 and later on for Dreamcast and Windows PC. The classic title quite in vogue at the time, with the fixed third-person view and a main character who moves around the maps of the game, collecting particular objects and jumping from one platform to another trying to avoid the enemies present or defeat them through of the fighting. At least from the structural point of view, because then, at least in the intentions of the developers, the game should have stood out from the competition for "adult" narrative themes and a plot that unfolded through numerous dialogues with non-player characters.

The orphan Cyprien

The protagonist of the story of Evil Twin: Cyprien's Chronicles is little Cyprien, a boy with a difficult character, who after the death of his parents found himself facing his difficult childhood in an orphanage. His life goes on with a thousand problems until, on his fourteenth birthday, following some events, he suddenly finds himself in an alternative world, where he discovers that Lenny, the talking teddy bear who is also his best friend, he was kidnapped by an evil and mysterious individual called Master. At this point the rescue operation was triggered.

To help Cyprien in the enterprise there was also his "bad" part, that is his twin Evil, endowed with particular powers and different weapons and potentialities, in which the protagonist could transform himself at any moment of the game. What made it rather enjoyable, and particularly different from the other exponents of the Evil Twin genre was, as mentioned before, the evolution of the plot and the amount of time it took to converse with the various non-player characters that populated the universe of the game. The same often entrusted secondary missions to be completed in the different maps, in order to further motivate the player to explore each area.

These were quite varied in terms of settings and level structure, as complex as they were coherent. with the various areas and themes. For the rest, the gameplay was, as we wrote at the beginning, that of most 3D platform games of the time, i.e. jumping with the character from one platform to another, collecting bonuses of various kinds such as additional life or additional energy to allow to little Cyprien to transform into an "enhanced" version of himself, SuperCyp, with the addition of devastating powers.

Dancer camera

Yet, despite these premises and the rather interesting basic idea, the game failed in its intent to propose a totally new experience and to establish itself as it seemed possible among the best exponents of the genre. And this is due to several technical problems. The graphics engine of the game, undoubtedly one of the strengths of the title, was indeed capable of recreating large and detailed game maps, but at the same time, at least on consoles, it could not withstand the most lively situations with obvious drops in the frame. installments.

Another negative element was the control system which, certainly thanks to the unfortunate vision given by the game camera, was almost always inaccurate. Everything was further tormented by a little evolved artificial intelligence, with enemies who tended to repeat their moves due to rather primitive behavioral routines, and a system of collision and collimation of polygons not always precise in its calculations, to the point of force the player to make millimeter jumps to avoid ruinous falls into the void, too frequent anyway precisely because of the reasons mentioned.

A sort of "tile" on the gamer's head, who often could not calculate his own movements and for this he was overwhelmed by events or enemies. Yet, in spite of everything, Evil Twin: Cyprien's Chronicles has remained in the memories of many videogamers, perhaps for a character with good potential in its own way, or perhaps for a setting that resumed and modeled as it should today, could restore a better and absolutely engaging experience, this time, as the guys from In Utero had imagined, a French development team that, due to the failure of the title, declared bankruptcy in 2002.