Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo – Review

Nostalgia has become an effective marketing tactic for the indie sphere, evident by the recent tidal wave of retro-themed platformers, shmups, “boomer shooters,” and other genres from the era. However, I urge you not to view this fact in a negative light. With instability building dread in the modern games industry, there’s no better escapism than enjoying the comfortable simplicity of old-school gaming, albeit with mixed degrees of success depending on which game you play. It’s the gaming equivalent of comfort food, and I am wholeheartedly glad it’s found a spot in the industry.

That being said, it’s still important that games build upon these past successes (and failures) and not just wallow in them. After all, the 1983 US games market crash was tied to this lack of improvement, before Nintendo’s NES revitalized the industry. Thankfully, most of the current indie sphere has no such problem, and that also applies to the release of 2025’s Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo. Developed by Brazilian indie studio Pocket Trap, Pipistrello is a top-down self-proclaimed “yoyo-vania,” combining the expansive movement upgrades of metroidvanias with the dungeon design of Zelda. Even if you haven’t played any of the source material, Pipistrello is a delightful blast from the past with just enough modern sensibility to avoid most pitfalls of typical retro jank.

Pipistrello takes place in the urban landscape of New Volt City, bustling thanks to wondrous electricity innovations spearheaded by Pipistrello Industries. Having acquired an overwhelming monopoly on electricity, they have effectively become the ruler of the city, all headed by one Madame Pipistrello. Recently, they’ve decided to embrace this power and imposed impossibly high energy tariffs, causing many businesses to go bankrupt. You play as Pippit, nephew of the wealthy CEO with a knack for yoyo tricks. During an annual visit to his auntie, Pippit stumbles into a joint scheme from crime entrepreneurs to fragment Madame’s soul as energy into four mega batteries to uplift their failing businesses. In a split-second effort to save his aunt, he launches his yoyo into the beam, absorbing part of Madame’s soul into it. With his auntie’s soul now split in five, it falls onto Pippit to infiltrate each of the now-booming businesses, steal back their respective mega-batteries, and unite Madame’s soul. Otherwise, he will have no means of financing his yoyo career, which is arguably a fate worse than death.

Pipistrello’s plot is just as asinine as it sounds, and they run it with fearless confidence. While not particularly in-depth with their critiques, each of the four corporations around the city paint entertaining satire on modern predatory business practices, whether that be the pitfalls of sports gambling, the addictive flavor of fast food, and everything in-between. This backdrop gives way to an amusing dynamic between the innocent protagonist and his obviously shady CEO aunt, with the contrast between her ruthless practicality and his frivolity amplified by the latter being in the driver’s seat. The absurd circumstances combined with the unlikely duo makes for quite entertaining chemistry, with several lines throughout putting a smile on my face.

New Volt City itself is also quite well-realized, combining the humor of typical city trappings without leaning too heavily into satire. The strips of constant traffic and honking horns, the constant construction, the oddly peaceful suburban-esque neighborhoods, all of which are present with their own distinctive color schemes. Colors are flat and character animations are limited to key poses, but that doesn’t make them any less expressive. Despite its bit limitations, characters and environments are ridiculously detailed, and their poses reek of personality, especially in their portraits. Despite the fantastical inhabitants, New Volt City is a wholly believable place, with numerous citizens and vehicles strewn about, with the latter going to where they need to be, regardless of your presence.

This beauty is amplified by the convincing GBA aesthetic. Every time you start the game, an animation plays of putting the game into a mock GBA and starting it up. Of course, because Nintendo has lawyers, it’s not a GBA; it’s a Pocket Trap. Setting aside legal differences, it’s clear what device you are supposed to be playing, and it’s a fun detail for those who grew up in the era. As a matter of fact, the game offers many graphical options to further immerse yourself within the quirks of a GBA screen, including screen transparency, light scratches, and even the ability to zoom out and see the device in its entirety as you play. Of course, all of these are optional. You can still enjoy the throwback fun of the era whilst enjoying the luxuries of a larger screen or monitor, but it’s wonderful to know these options are there.

The soundtrack is also worth mentioning, even if it is influenced by my nostalgia for the GBA era of Pokemon. Anyone who’s even heard of the Generation 3 Pokemon games, whether that be the Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald trifecta or FireRed/LeafGreen, will instantly recognize the instrument selection for the majority of Pipistrello’s tracks: raging compressed trumpets and synths. Even setting aside the nostalgia trip from the instrument selection, the tracks themselves are memorable, taking the limitations of the hardware and giving it their own personality. The beginning two areas have their own mini-leitmotif, almost like a mini-blanket to entice customers towards their product. Once you descend deeper into those areas, they become a lot more menacing, like a sheep in a lion’s den. The underbelly of these businesses drops the facade, and a new musical personality takes center stage. In later areas, these facades are much thinner, and the true nature of these businesses are much more apparent. These tracks are a neat reflection of the measures many modern businesses take to dress their wolves in sheep’s clothing.

If that’s not enough to spark excitement from the nostalgia, the game even kicks off with a guest track from legendary composer Yoko Shimomura. For those who don’t know her, Shimomura’s work spreads far across the games industry, composing for beloved games such as Mario and Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story, Street Fighter II, Super Mario RPG, and many titles in the Kingdom Hearts series, whilst also having guest tracks in games like Streets of Rage 4 and Street Fighter 6. Even if you haven’t listened to her work prior to playing this game, this is one of the strongest opening themes you can have for a game, bar none.

If you have ever played any of the top-down Zelda titles over the years, whether that be The Minish Cap for the GBA, A Link Between Worlds for the 3DS, or even the more recent iteration of Link’s Awakening, you will feel right at home navigating the world of Pipistrello. Your move set starts off quite simple: full 360 degree movement, a jump, and a forward attack with your yoyo, similar to how old-school Link would thrust his sword forward. However, the game wastes no time introducing you to its primary mechanic: diagonals. Whenever you hit a diagonal with your yoyo, it reflects right off in whatever direction it points. You are not limited to one diagonal, so you can hit as many diagonals as your yoyo is able to reach, allowing for a ridiculous range of attack. This is the meat and potatoes of Pipistrello’s gameplay loop, and the game creatively iterates on the concept as you expand your arsenal of yoyo tricks throughout the game.

Speaking of yoyos, your arsenal of movement and combat abilities are centered around your yoyo, with many cutely named/modeled off of real yoyo tricks. For example, you can use an offstring trick to launch your yoyo at obstacles from far away, or you can “walk the dog” to propel yourself forward and sprint across water. These tricks aren’t limited to puzzles or maneuverability. You can swing your yoyo “around the world” to stun all enemies around a short radius, or you can pull a “sleeper” trick, spinning your yoyo at the end of the string to consistently damage idle targets. It’s not only creatively thematic, but also mechanically consistent with very little, if any redundancy in utility.

The variety of challenges available in Pipistrello can be broken down into three core pillars: movement, puzzles, and combat. While this is casting a wide net, the pillars never feel divorced from one another because of how well they tie back to the core mechanics. The distance covered with an offstring yoyo throw can snipe a lever or an enemy. “Walking the dog” is just as much of a movement technique as it is a facet for puzzles or even a retreat tactic in combat. Of course, not every trick is this interconnected, but they all service the core gameplay loop to some capacity, and it works. It takes simple mechanics and stretches their utility as far as it can go. It convincingly mimics how a GBA successor to (The Legend of Zelda:) The Minish Cap would play, modernizing it without sacrificing the authenticity of the GBA “feel.”

These mechanics are supplemented with some of the most satisfying level design I have seen in a Zelda-like. Taking inspiration from both the Metroidvania and Zelda genres, Pipistrello delivers what you’d expect: a large, interconnected world that progressively opens up as you unlock more items and abilities. The main four dungeons are split into two halves, with you required to complete the first two before you can do the other half, though you can pick which order you do each dungeon in their respective halves. Each dungeon you explore offers a new movement ability to toy with, challenges and puzzles that escalate in difficulty as you come to grips with the new mechanic, capped off with an exciting boss fight. On top of the added movement mechanic, each dungeon also implements a secondary mechanic to not only ease players into the dungeon, but also subvert them by tying them to the movement mechanic in later challenges. Additionally, mechanics found in the first half dungeons are completely independent from one another, only reintroducing them once you have acquired a firm familiarity with them in the second half. What results is a semi-nonlinear game that manages to achieve a relatively smooth difficulty curve whilst remaining fresh throughout.

Outside of the dungeons, the open-ended city is densely packed with optional, bite-sized challenges, puzzles, and combat encounters. Completing them often rewards you with a decent sum of cash or Pipistrello’s equivalent of Zelda’s heart containers or Hollow Knight’s charm notches. On their own, most of them aren’t particularly tough, with me solving most of them within the first 1-2 minutes of entering the room. However, that doesn’t change the fact that I went through every single one, even beyond what the platinum trophy requested of me, simply because they were fun to do. They’re not hard, but they force me to stop long enough and ponder the string of moves needed to complete the puzzle. This combined with the satisfying feeling of actually doing it put me in an intoxicating rhythm of curiosity and satisfaction.

As your means of traversal expands, so does the breadth of the movement challenges, and it’s where the magic of Pipistrello’s movement lies. Later platforming challenges are designed to be more punishing, requiring a longer string of movements without failing, lest you start back at the last chunk of solid ground. While this sounds like it would be incredibly frustrating, they are finely tuned to hit a sweet spot in difficulty. You do move fast, but not so fast that it feels like playing Ultrakill with the fast forward button held down. The challenge comes not from nailing each trick with practiced precision, but rather thinking quickly enough and stringing a sequence of moves together that gets you to the other side. Once you reach a flow state here, Pipistrello’s movement offers the visceral satisfaction of a successful parkour run after a line of uncut coke.

If you were to pull my arm for the weakest link, combat would most likely fit the bill. By no means is it bad, but it does have the highest contrast with the other pillars, and it can be a bit at odds with some of the other mechanics in place. Basic combat is as straightforward as it can be for a Zelda-like: stick the pointy end of the sword at the enemy until they die, but instead of a sword, it’s a yoyo. It’s a solid foundation, aided by the added utility of other moves you learn throughout the game, but the difficulty curve of these encounters can be wonky. As per the standard for most Zelda-likes, combat rooms lock the door as you enter them, dropping hordes of enemies for you to defeat before moving on. While many rooms offer you diagonals and other traps for you to use against them, there are also small empty rooms that flood with enemies in an instant. While there are plenty of tools for crowd control, encountering these rooms early on can be quite the punishing spike in difficulty, as you may not always have the tools to deal with these types of encounters. As such, they can sometimes give way to messy brawls, and while it is exhilarating to make it through fights like those, it can also get frustrating when it feels like you can’t defeat enemies quickly enough to keep them from overwhelming you. Thankfully, most of these types of encounters are tied to optional collectibles, so you can either skip them or come back later when you have the proper tools.

On top of your own yoyo tricks, Pipistrello also has a badge and light skill tree to enhance your combat abilities. Badges are the Hollow Knight charm equivalent, discovered by exploring the world and completing optional challenges. You only have a certain number of badge points, and each badge takes up a certain number of said badge points, so putting builds together is ensuring that you have all the buffs you need whilst remaining within budget. The suite of options available are mostly pretty standard, and while there is some build potential, combat build variety is a bit lacking since many of them feel like redundant or worse variations of “hitting things faster or inflicting stun or flames.” Where the badges stick out are “Cheater” badges, badges that contradict the main game mechanics and effectively break the rules of the game. On their own, this is already a worthwhile reward for exploration, because many of them are genuine game-changers and change how you can look at a puzzle (usually by making them easier). However, these badges also come with their own mini-puzzle/challenge in the surrounding area where you acquired it. What’s better than a game-changing “cheat?” Content that was built for said game-breaking cheats! It’s almost a meta-level progression in puzzle difficulty, requiring you to take what you know about your suite of abilities and completely reframe it to fit within this contradictory new ruleset.

The skill tree offers the same feeling of familiarity as the badges system, though the former introduces a novel twist on how you acquire said skills: debt. You are able to acquire any available skill immediately with zero upfront payment. However, getting the skill accrues debt, and you are not allowed to unlock another skill until you pay it off. This debt also can’t be paid off immediately, even if you have the money to do so. As the lender is very germaphobic, you are only able to pay with the money you find on the ground, rather than what’s already in your pocket. In other words, 50% of the money you collect goes towards repayment, so playing the game will naturally pay off your debts. However, don’t go thinking you can just stay in debt, as each skill comes with its own debuff while you are in debt, becoming increasingly debilitating as you progress through the tree. The debuffs themselves are straightforward, such as reduced health, badge points, damage, or disabling the spawning of healing items from fallen enemies.

Conceptually, I love this mechanic, flipping skill systems on their head and offering some fun decision-making as to whether you can safely pay off your debts without going broke in the process, since dying loses you money. However, I wish the skills themselves were more worth the trouble it was to pay for them. While the skills themselves are valuable, they can be a bit underwhelming, especially when coupled with the disadvantages you get by accruing debt. Combined with the wobbly difficulty of combat encounters, this mechanic can be quite punishing and sap money from players’ wallets. Thankfully, the curve of money lost upon repeatedly dying in the same room was adjusted to level out much quicker, so getting stuck won’t completely drain your finances. Even with these in mind, combat is still an entertaining pillar in Pipistrello’s gameplay foundation, picked out not because it’s weak, but because it’s weaker.

Unlike most Metroidvanias, Pipistrello doesn’t require you to complete everything to earn its platinum trophy. Rather, you are only required to beat a fair chunk of optional content, including the most meaningful challenges available and a fraction of the collectibles. The rest of the optional content and collectibles are strictly for those who want more Pipistrello; More specifically, me. Even after earning the platinum trophy, I went out of my way to do everything the game had to offer, collecting everything, and ending the game at 100% completion.

There are also some miscellaneous challenges related to certain yoyo tricks, some of which are on the grindy side, but nothing should take more than 10-15 minutes, especially if you are regularly utilizing your arsenal of combat tricks throughout the game. What is worth talking about are the actual challenge modes available throughout the world, such as a combat colosseum, a platforming puzzle room, and others that test your abilities in certain pillars or mechanics. These are great fun and decently challenging, especially when striving for the best rewards the game requires for the platinum.

It’s also worth mentioning that there are Celeste-esque assist modifiers to make the game easier, if you wish. The customizability is surprisingly vast, including adjustable metrics like health, badge points, damage dealt/received, healing item drop frequency, money drop multipliers, money loss multipliers, and even speed modifiers. The game, and by extension the platinum, can be as easy or brutally difficult as you like. However, I encourage you to play with default settings or minimal adjustments, because this game’s content is absolutely worth experiencing as is.

Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo feels like it came from an alternate universe, where Nintendo pushed the GBA to its physical and creative limits, and it shows with its relentless charm. Its mechanics are thematically and mechanically cohesive, coupled with wonderfully engaging level design that entranced me all the way to 100% completion, even if the combat came with some growing pains. The platinum trophy only requires the most important content completed, with the rest as a treat for players who want more. Even if certain portions are a little too hard, assist settings exist to reduce or completely mitigate them if the player so wishes. Genuinely compelling metroidvanias are a rare breed, and Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is wholeheartedly worth celebrating alongside classics like Hollow Knight.