Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo Review (PC) – Debt Bondage

Crossing a Game Boy Zelda combat puzzle adventure and the cool of Jet Set Radio and original Sonic? Sounds too good to be true. Throw in some Hollow Knight badges, an animal mafia drawn like they just got spat out of the 90s? What about cursed yoyos, and batteries powered by souls, and, and, and… you get the picture. Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is a lot, maybe more than it can handle.

Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

So, I’ve given you a flavour there, but the story of Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is bonkers. Pippit is the youngest of the powerful Pipistrello bat tycoon family, powerful because they run the whole world’s supply of electricity, derived somehow from flowers. They’re a monopoly with a vice-like grip on the economy, and they aren’t really your average hero’s family. Except maybe Batman. So it’s not much surprise when four other business bosses want a share of the pie and repurpose head honcho Auntie Pipistrello’s experimental soul-converting battery machine to assassinate her. Only Pippit gets in the way, or rather, his Yoyo does.

Now Madam Pipistrello’s soul has been split into five pieces, one of which resides in Pippit’s Cursed Yoyo, and it’s up to Pippit to use said Yoyo and visit all the city’s various districts to recover the batteries containing the pieces of poor megalomaniac Auntie’s soul. That’s a lot of hard work to make sure your allowance doesn’t stop.

Each encounter with the bosses is like an episode of an old cartoon, each with their own reason for doing what they did, their own tyrannical money-hungry use for the mega-battery’s power, their own way of enslaving or duping the populace. It’s very on the nose, but of course it is. It’s not trying to be deep. Dialogue is generally funny in the right ways, and Pipistrello’s adventure is full of one-liners, quips and sarcasm throughout. I loved the tone.

…and I’m All Outta Bubblegum

Pippit’s Yoyo kinda turns him into Link, albeit with one multi-purpose weapon. He can shoot it long distances, rebound it off walls, use it to carry batteries and items, collect money, and best of all, ride it across pits and water. There’s a whole bunch of Yoyo trick moves for combat, like Around The World to get you out of a tight spot. If there are two things Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is obsessed with, it’s Money and Electricity. And Yoyo’s. But mainly Money and Electricity. Every quest revolves around money, and every puzzle involves a battery.

The world is set up as an interconnected city block, looking close to an original GTA game in pixelated glory. You move about solving key-or-battery-related puzzles and progressing from room to room. About half the game is outside, puzzling your way into each of the four districts, and the other half is inside the workings of their particular business enterprise. There’s a lot of little bits that fall somewhere in the middle, like ten screens in the police station for example, but that is the basic structure.

I won’t go into describing the puzzles in great detail as you’ve got to play them for it to make sense, but it’s a lot of levers, gaps, and rebounds to get either Pippit or a battery or a Yoyo or a key where you need them to be. I liked them all across the game, and I felt much of the increase in difficulty was fair and taught you what you needed to know. However, I did find that each area went on just that touch too long, and I wanted a break or wanted to get out and get to the next place. It was a lot of pain for very little tangible reward, except just a lot more of the same. If you’re still enjoying it, that’s all fine. But when it starts to wear, I can see people putting it down and just never coming back.

Debt Bondage

So that’s the electricity side – what about the money? Pippit finds a few cousins early on (who survived the coup), both of which then hideout in their sewer safehouse. One cousin can take blueprints and make badges that give you moves and passive abilities, and you pay him money for each blueprint and badge, for the materials I suppose. Normal transaction.

However, the other cousin is into debt bondage. Like, her kink is mortgages. Her service is to let you have a passive sort of skill, like attack damage up or more skill points, and let you have the skill up front, but she’ll take half your earnings while you work off your debt to her for the skill. And she’ll hit you with a debuff of some kind at the same time, until you work off your debt.

I have never seen a contractual debt skill system employed in a videogame before. It kinda hurts, but it’s also pretty awesome. I hate the reason given, that she’s a germaphobe who only wants new coins, rather than the ones that have been in your pocket, but that’s being picky. It’s a strange but interesting system that has you almost always giving away half your coins to a good cause, rather than losing a bunch when you die, but also has you constantly debuffed in some way, which can be very detrimental against a boss. The game is hard enough as it is.

YoYo Ma

Speaking of bosses, Pipistrello’s are frantic and crazy affairs. It can be fiddly to get all your new found skills, moves and power ups committed to finger-memory, and actually be able to pull off all the rebounds and move cancels you need to to stay alive long enough to take them out. Most took me a good few attempts to win convincingly.

Enemies don’t present much difficulty on their own, but the whole game is based on each screen being a puzzle and a locked-in combat challenge, and I lost count of the times it throws a few dozen enemies at you at once. That’s hard in a modern game committed to combat, but in a glorified GBA game it’s punishing. I praised a higher Yoyo power when I got the Around the World skill and could eek out some distance for a second’s breath.

Again, maybe being picky or too used to games with more, but I found the enemy variety pretty low, and you will encounter the same dull blob things from the beginning to the very end of the game.

Throw Some Shapes

Graphically, Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is a strange beast. It’s on the ‘big pixels’ side of pixel art games, if that makes sense. Like it’s really not hiding that everything is made of squares, and that has a certain charm. A really retro ’90s Gameboy sort of charm. What it doesn’t do is try to compete with the aesthetically beautiful pixel art games, like Octopath Traveller, for example.

And speaking of Gameboy, there’s this whole mode dedicated to squeezing down your screen to something close to a handheld size, thereby also decreasing the pixel size, and then having an actual pretend Gameboy Advance or Pocket Trap’s own little handheld-that-never-was, enveloping the screen. It’s a neat effect, if a little strangely off-putting to begin with. I got into it though. Pipistrello’s big pixels and everything about its puzzles and design screams handheld in a way that not every pixelart games does. So the handheld mode really does make sense.

For those who actually play the game on Steam Deck or Nintendo Switch, there’s going to be virtually no point to this, but you’ll also be getting the best possible version of the experience.

Walk The Bat

Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is a tightly designed little homage to Gameboy adventures, with hours of puzzles and exploring before you even get close to reaching the end. It will probably test your patience and your resolve. It’s not the most responsive in the faster, more frenetic battles or trickier more platforming-type puzzles, which can be to its detriment. The more cerebral and slower-paced puzzle rooms worked better.

I think I just found the amount of punishment-to-reward too far on the punishment side. I found less and less reason to continue, feeling more and more like I’d seen everything the game was about in the first 3 hours, and then having to fiddle and retry my way through a dozen more hours of it.

If you enjoy the tongue-in-cheek humour, the fun style and retro vibe, Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo will provide many hours of old-school Yoyoing fun. However, for me, I found that fun to be far too repetitive and ultimately not as rewarding as I wanted it to be.

Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is out now for PC via Steam (review platform), PlayStation 5, Xbox systems, and Nintendo Switch.

Developers: Pocket Trap

Publisher: PM Studios

Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.

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