Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo Review
Pocket Trap and PM Studios’ excellent Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is a nostalgic game with novel mechanics and challenging puzzles.
Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo. Pocket Trap / PM Studios
Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo reminds me of one of my all-time favorite games. Not only did it make me feel like I did when I played it—Pipstrello brought something new to the table that makes it unique, introducing gameplay mechanics that feel new. That game is The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening; to liken another game to it is high praise coming from me.
You are Pippit, a yoyo enthusiast and youngest member of the Pipistrello family—a family respected and feared in the city for their iron grip on the electric company. Four jealous crime bosses attempt to murder Madame Pippistrello, Pippit’s aunt who runs the company, by trapping her soul in four powerful batteries that can provide endless energy. Unknown to them, a fifth part of her soul gets trapped in Pippit’s yoyo. Pippit must help his aunt defeat the crime bosses, take back the batteries, and reclaim her soul.
Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo. Pocket Trap / PM Studios
Pipstrello is a 2D action game with a top-down oblique perspective, similar to the 2D Legend of Zelda games. Pippit can explore his city, its sewers, and several interiors that can be small puzzle rooms or large dungeons. Each room is full of enemies or NPCs and there is no shortage of challenging puzzles. Many areas are gated by abilities that Pippit must learn, like a typical metroidvania—or as the devs call it, “yoyovania.”
And “yoyovania” is an apt term to describe the game. Pippit’s attacks and traversal-oriented special abilities all involve his yoyo. Pippit can throw it, use it to dash across water, create grapple points, roll on walls, and more. Diagonal corners deflect the yoyo at 90°, useful for throws and dashes and sometimes necessary for combat.
The yoyo also functions like Link’s hook shot, retrieving items or pulling Pippit toward grapple points. Inversely, the yoyo can carry items like keys when you throw it, bouncing off walls to reach out-of-the-way locks. If you throw the yoyo to snag an item, you can fling out the string to catch the yoyo again; some of the coolest puzzles involve figuring out the way to get items around obtacles this way. Solving some puzzles ends up feeling like calculating complex shots in a game of pool.
The game has a staggering variety of puzzles the developers have designed around creative use of Pippit’s abilities, and they never get repetitive or stale. Some of the traversal puzzles are downright fiendish, requiring the use of different abilities sequentially with perfect timing to avoid falling into pits. There are a few points of the game where players must complete several of these challenges back to back without losing all their life points, and it’s tough. In the worst cases, I was able to get through just as I was about ready to pull my hair out; it’s a testament to how much I loved the game that I insisted on completing these optional puzzles.
Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo. Pocket Trap / PM Studios
Combat can be challenging, but gets easier as Pippit learns his combat abilities—parry, chain attacks, and more. Bosses are tough but can be bested with patience and attention to patterns. The final boss was the only one that got simply too frustrating, because the fight involves completing traversal challenges in between short phases of fighting, opportunities to heal are limited, and death means starting it over. It was the only time I took advantage of the game’s highly customizable diffiuculty settings, which allow players to tweak eight different parameters.
In Pippistrello, there are three ways for players to increase power and tweak abilities. The first is a badge system, which allows Pippit to equip badges based on the number of available badge points (BP). Players can upgrade these for cash at Pippit’s base, increasing their effectiveness or reducing the BP cost. Next, players can collect HP and BP containers are hidden around the world, usually behind challenging puzzles; these permanently increase those stats.
Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo. Pocket Trap / PM Studios
The third and most interesting is through a skill tree, which works in an unusual way. Each node on the tree has a cost, but it’s not paid up front. Instead, Pippit takes on “contracts,” where half of Pippit’s income is taken until the cost is covered. During this time, players must also contend with irritating debuffs that can significantly increase that game’s difficulty. The system forces players to work on a single talent upgrade at a time, but I’m unconvinced it’s beneficial to the game and wonder if the contract mechanic is necessary; it doesn’t add to the game’s fun and I wouldn’t have missed it had it not been included. The associated debuffs stick around too long and are too punishing.
Pipistrello would feel right at home on a Game Boy Advance. The game’s pixel art graphics are tailored to make it feel like the game is a lost gem from that era. The tile-constructed world is colorful and provides the visual clarity necessary to understand the puzzles. Pippit, the main NPCs, and all the enemies have memorable, distinctive designs. The visual and audio effects when Pippit interacts with objects or hits enemies have just the right amount of juice to make playing feel great. This is something that’s hard to get right, and Pocket Trap does it.
Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo. Pocket Trap / PM Studios
Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is an amazing game. If it had been released on the Game Boy Advance, it would be remembered as one of the best games on the console. It’s easy for games to slip under the radar with the sheer number that hit Steam and other storefronts each day, especially small indie games. This one deserves your full attention, especially if you love top-down action adventure games. Despite its very few shortcomings, Pipistrello is a true treasure. Pocket Trap has made a retro game that feels new, and that’s tough to do.
Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is available now on Steam, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4/5, and Xbox Series X|S.
Overall Score: 10/10
Played on: PS5
