Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo

As I darted around the PAX East showfloor, my former coworker Elijah Gonzalez at Paste Magazine made sure there was one game I knew about: freakin’ Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo. On my final day at the show, I finally found the time to visit its booth and stood transfixed as I just watched others play through it. Pipistrello, a GBA-style “yoyovania,” has undoubtedly got the sauce. The titular hero is the crown prince (and a yo-yo enthusiast) visiting his auntie when the castle is suddenly besieged by some ne’er-do-wells who try to use her own device to capture her. Thanks to some intervention from her nephew, though, her soul is instead trapped within his yo-yo and she becomes your companion. What a whimsical setup for what I already believe to be a charming little game.

Once I got my hands on Pipistrello, it really came together. Screens are filled with angular walls and slants which you are able to bounce your yo-yo off of to incredible effect. Instead of just processing the positions of enemies relative to yourself, Pipistrello really encourages players to consider the geometry of the room when deciding on the best approach to a fight and to puzzle solving. A later ability allowed me to launch the yo-yo separately from the string and similarly bound it off walls to retrieve far-away items, and every solution tickled my brain. The simple and succinct change wrought by this new ability immediately made me pay attention to my surroundings even more than the game’s adorable and vibrant art style.

Thanks to its deliberate throwback to GBA-style visuals, every screen of Pipistrello is also compact and filled with just what it needs, nothing less and nothing more. At a time where most games are bigger than they ought to be, it’s refreshing to play something that’s a small and tight experience by design, and I can’t wait to see how the yoyo-based gameplay evolves. — Moises Taveras