Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo Review: A Love Letter to Retro Gaming!

In my experience, it’s often assumed that the biggest perk of reviewing video games is the privilege of playing something you’re excited for before it releases to the public. And yeah, you’d be justified in calling me full of crap if I denied that was pretty cool - it’s nice, for sure. But it’s not the best part. The best part is reviewing games like Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo – a game I would, in any other scenario, never have played on my own. My personal interest in both metroidvanias and retro games is about as strong as my interest in those steamed, unseasoned vegetables you may get on the side of a restaurant entrée. Far from bad and will do in a pinch, but hardly a source of excitement for me.

And yet, I’ve discovered after years of reviewing indie games that some of my most enjoyable reviews come from titles that may not tick my boxes on paper, but shine with enough quality to transcend genre preferences and become broadly unmissable. Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is such a game.

The first thing you’ll notice about Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is that its commitment to being a long-lost Game Boy Advance title goes hard. The chunky, pixelated start menu may work like any other but is grafted onto a 3D-rendered “Pocket Trap Game system” that will swivel and rotate around the screen as if encouraging you to reach through and pick it up. Accordingly, this is an amazing title for Steam Deck and works out of the box on it without issue, complete with optional retro screen filters and image scaling options to tweak to your heart’s content. So determined is Pipistrello to be a handheld game that I found myself preferring not only to play it that way the overwhelming majority of the time, but to even scale the image down a bit to make it truly feel like I was playing on a device that fits in my pocket. Finally, a game that looks better the smaller your screen is – take that, AAA gaming’s never-ending obsession with graphical fidelity!

In Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo, you play as Pippit, a self-proclaimed yoyo champion who’s far more concerned with climbing the ranks of yoyo competitions than he is getting involved with the rest of the business-savvy energy tycoons that make up the Pipistrello family. But of course, on the one day a year Pippit drops by his aunt’s mansion for a visit, her struggling competitors crash through her wall and steal four mega batteries that must be returned to keep control of the Pipistrello energy monopoly. So begins your journey through the city to get those mega batteries back. Side note: I dare you to say Pippit Pipistrello ten times fast - I bet you can’t.

While the story isn’t the main draw of Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo, I appreciate its insistence on being more morally nuanced than most of its genre’s ilk. It’s clear early on that Pippit views his and his aunt’s interests as relatively aligned, but also that he and his family don’t quite click, and the way they run their company hardly did much to prevent their competitors from needing to take drastic measures. It’s not a plot that’s likely to stick with me, but is fun enough to follow along with, that the abundance of dialogue never felt like a liability.

Gameplay is what we’re here for though, and Pippit’s yoyo tricks are no slouch in this department. You’ll begin your journey with only a couple of moves, which include flinging your yoyo at enemies or flicking it off the string to send it further with more damage, though you’ll have to wait a few seconds for your yoyo to respawn in your hand if it separates from you or falls into a trap. Even in these earlier, more mechanically restrictive parts of the game, combat is surprisingly fun due to interesting, diverse enemies and level design that emphasizes thoughtful creativity over mindless string-flinging.

Many rooms in Pipistrello are filled with deliberately angled corners you can use to redirect your yoyo conveniently into an enemy’s face or even fling it off the string into a deadly infinite loop if the corners are lined up just right. While some enemies will merely bounce toward you and threaten to dock one of your hearts with a single touch, others will relentlessly fling themselves toward you or even shoot bullets that can be redirected by the same corner angles you may have thought were only for your benefit. The introduction of interesting enemies continues throughout the journey and is supplemented by some excellent and properly challenging boss fights that put your abilities through a rigorous test.

These early game areas are a lot of fun, but like any metroidvania worth its salt, before long you’ll progress far enough to unlock a host of new yoyo tricks that significantly impact not only combat but traversal too. You’ll learn to “walk the dog” along bodies of water, fling yourself away from walls for some tricky but satisfying platforming, and a large array of other moves that feel great to pull off in the right contexts. But a huge part of Pipistrello’s appeal is not just in the wide yoyo moveset, but how thoughtfully it’s been integrated into every core aspect of its design from combat to platforming to puzzles. All of these elements are dependably exciting to encounter, which impressed me especially on the platforming front, since I didn’t envision the game’s perspective to allow for much in the way of precision platforming. Well, consider me wrong, because there were several platforming sequences in Pipistrello that made me sweat and were all the more satisfying to finally pull off.

Similarly, many rooms in Pipistrello present you with incredibly clever puzzles that sometimes feel impossible until that exact moment you figure them out. As an adamant puzzle game fan, I have to say that the design of these puzzles ranges from clever to utterly ingenious, although there were times when it was hard to fully discern whether a puzzle required a move I hadn’t picked up yet. The game is usually good about clearly identifying areas you can’t progress through yet on the map, though, so I would not be surprised if some of its optional puzzles simply bested me.

Optional challenges are absolutely worth seeking out though, because Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is a difficult game. Seeking out its side content will net you heart containers that increase your maximum health if you collect eight of them, or find badges that passively buff your move set in helpful, if sometimes uninteresting ways. Pippit has a number of badge points he can use to equip badges, with each having a cost relative to its benefit, like increasing your attack power or allowing for a longer recovery time when hit. While you can’t equip very many of these to start, there are a number of ways to increase your total pool of badge points, as well as make badges themselves cheaper to equip.

One way to increase your badge points is through Pipistrello’s upgrade system, which is designed in a really unique way that I haven’t personally seen before.

Rather than spending your hard-earned coins to buy upgrades directly, any purchasable upgrade can be used immediately regardless of the money you have.  However, that purchase will put you into debt, and 50% of the coins you collect from that point on will go towards paying that debt off.  And you’ll want to do so, as every bit of debt in the game comes with a temporary negative effect, such as having one less heart on your life bar or lowering your total pool of badge points.  It’s a really cool system in that it ensures you can keep progressing your skills regardless of how good you are at holding onto your money.  After all, by default, dying makes you lose roughly 10% of your total funds, so it would be a bummer to be locked out of the upgrade system if you’re not very good at the game.  The debt system provides an elegant way around this, and adds a thoughtful element of risk and reward.

With that said, though, I have to admit that certain upgrades felt so minor that being indebted for them, however temporarily, didn’t feel worth it.  But thankfully, the upgrade tree usually allows you to pick multiple paths to the upgrades you ultimately want.

While it’s worth doubling down on the point that Pipistrello is not an easy game, I must also point out that it comes with an absolutely incredible array of difficulty modifiers that are a massive win for accessibility.  There are eight different modifiers here that can be customized to your heart’s content, including extra life, extra badge points, damage dealt or received, loot drops from enemies, money lost on game over, and a toggle for fall damage.  This is a wonderful feature that a lot of people are bound to appreciate, and is certain to only further widen Pipistrello’s appeal. 

The only thing that threatened to ever derail my experience with Pipistrello is a common pitfall I always seem to hit with metroidvanias, which is a couple of times when I felt hopelessly lost, with no idea where to go next.  Thankfully, Pipistrello does have a pretty good map, and cleaning up some unexplored areas did wonders for helping me find my footing, even if some of the time spent lost was a bit frustrating.  That’s probably more of a “me” thing anyway, and the primary reason I don’t usually play metroidvanias.  Here, thankfully, it was mild enough to get past it.

I’m going to admit, yet again, that retro games aren’t typically my chosen style.  But I really appreciate Pipistrello’s commitment to its retro handheld aesthetic.  Its high-quality pixel art, massive variety in environments to traverse, and consistently great soundtrack do a lot to make it approachable even for heathens like myself who are spoiled by more modern visuals and art styles.  You’ll almost certainly know by this video alone if the aesthetic is for you, but let me say from experience – if you think it’s not for you, you may be surprised at how willing you are to overlook it once you start actually playing.

The further I got in Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo, the more appealing it ultimately became.  It’s a testament to consistently exemplary design that I couldn’t stop playing a game that, on paper, I wouldn’t usually give a second look.  But Pipistrello is just that good, and does a fantastic job of taking mechanics that seem relatively simple in theory, and applying them to a wide variety of enemy encounters, puzzles, and platforming challenges in a way that makes them feel natural.  It wasn’t until later in my playthrough that I even realized the developer, Pocket Trap, is also responsible for one of my favorite indies of 2021, Dodgeball Academia, and suddenly my love for Pipistrello started to make even more sense.  This is a really talented indie developer, and I hope that even if Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo might not appeal to everybody, its quality can be broadly recognized enough to bring them the success they truly deserve.

ESSENTIAL