When I was a kid, there was a moment when it felt like everyone was obsessed with yo-yos. I never got better than just being able to make the yo-yo go up and down. But with Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo, I could pretend like I was halfway decent — all while playing a silly game that feels like a spiritual successor to the Game Boy Advance titles I loved growing up.
Pipistrello is a top-down adventure game, in which you use your yo-yo to attack enemies and traverse the world. You play as Pippit, a goofy bat who has dreams of yo-yo excellence but is also a freeloader who relies on financial support from his wealthy aunt, an energy magnate. In the opening minutes of the game, the aunt gets merged with your yo-yo as four big baddies steal her Mega Batteries, and your goal is to get the batteries back and help free her.
Walk the dog. Image: Pocket Trap / PM Studios, Inc
The game is quite charming. Pippit is a lovable doofus, and you’ll also be tasked with ridiculous missions like rounding up people for a soccer fan club so you can get easier access to a stadium run by a corrupt boss, who wants people to gamble. The pixel art is great, too — it looks exactly like what I remember from GBA games, even though I played Pipistrello on my Steam Deck OLED’s far more modern screen. (But if you want to go full retro, there is a mode that mimics the GBA’s look, and it even frames the game on a pretend handheld.)
Pocket Trap, the game’s developer, makes Pippit’s yo-yo more than just a toy. It’s also good for bashing enemies, of course. But you can even chuck the yo-yo off the string to hit enemies at range or spin it around you to keep them at bay. And as you progress, you’ll get additional yo-yo-themed moves that will help you more easily fend off baddies, explore the city that the game takes place in, and solve puzzles. Many of the moves are based on actual yo-yo tricks: the walk the dog move, for example, sends the yo-yo surging forward, yanking Pippit along so he can cross bodies of water.
The game also has a very good skill tree with a contract-based system. When you pick up a contract, you have to work off a money debt and deal with some kind of penalty until you pay back the contract in full, like losing a heart or some attack power. The system forces you to be thoughtful about which contract to take on and helps keep you from becoming overpowered too quickly.
This mode is almost like playing on a GBA. Image: Pocket Trap / PM Studios, Inc
Not that you should really worry about getting too strong, though. I found that Pipistrello was really difficult, especially early on. Pipistrello has a lot of combat, and enemies frequently overwhelmed me. There’s not a huge penalty for dying — you just lose some coins and can tackle the room again — but some rooms were still pretty tough and took multiple tries to finish.
Fortunately, Pipistrello has a very flexible difficulty system that lets you tweak things like your attack power or how many coins enemies drop. You can even nullify fall damage. As I played, I frequently messed around with the options to help smooth over some particularly tricky sections.
I’ll admit that by the end of my nearly 10-hour playthrough, I often made myself invincible so that I could more quickly see the rest of the story, the puzzles, and the platforming. The combat rooms became too much of a time suck for me. But even though the enemies posed no danger, I still had a blast yo-yoing them to death. And I still had to figure out puzzles on my own, too, so it’s not like I made the game a total walk in the park.
If you’re feeling nostalgic for the pixel graphics and blaring horns of GBA games, Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo scratches that itch — and has some clever new ideas, too. It won’t actually make you better at using a yo-yo, but it’s pretty darn fun to have one in a video game.
Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is available now on Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation, and Xbox.
