Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo review

I just love it when a game comes seemingly out of nowhere and takes me completely by surprise. Today, that game is Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo, now available on PC and consoles. The elevator pitch? A Zelda-style adventure where your weapon is a yoyo. But brought to life with colourful pixel animation and packed with so much zest and personality, it’s so much more than a clone of something that came before.

In fact, I’d go as far as to say that there’s nothing quite like Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo. Set in an urban townscape, you take on the role of Pippit, a young yoyo master. You’re part of the famous Pipistrello family, owners of an electric company, and even though you’ve never really fit in, when your auntie, the great Madame Pipistrello, is in danger, you rush to save her. A rival company has just bust into Pipistrello HQ, stole the source of the electricity and defeated your aunt in the process.

Well, sort of. Somehow, your aunt ends up getting transplanted into your yoyo (?), although with multiple energy sources now stolen and dotted around the city, there’s only one thing to be done to restore the Pipistrello company and, hopefully, your aunt: get them back.

And so begins a journey across the in-game city that will see you hunting down each one of the energy sources. There are buildings to infiltrate, bosses to defeat, and a whole lot of environmental puzzles to solve. All by using your yoyo.

Whether it’s combat, activating switches or getting from one side of the screen to the other, your yoyo is often the answer. You can swing it out to hit an enemy, or you can release it straight out in front of you to hit anything that lays in its path. Better yet, look for corners and slopes in your environment and you can send your yoyo on a path where it’ll bounce off multiple corners. Pulling off a combo in this way, defeating multiple enemies at once, is seriously satisfying.

As you progress through the game you’ll unlock new abilities, like being able to ride your own yoyo across water — an invaluable tool for getting to previously unreachable areas. You can also use it to grab items out of reach, or to activate switches that you can’t physically get to. Essentially, then, Pippit’s yoyo is the ultimate combi-tool.

If that wasn’t nifty enough, the game has a unique upgrade system unlike anything else I’ve ever encountered. Find the relevant family member around town — the company’s financial manager — and you’ll be able to unlock a range of upgrades via a progression tree. But rather than just buy them outright, every upgrade is a loan. You’ll need to take some sort of hit as a down payment: maybe one of your hearts will be temporarily blocked, or enemies won’t drop hearts. Then, as you collect coins, some of it will automatically be apportioned to your loan payments. Only once it’s paid off will you be fully restored to your former glory. At that point, you’re also free to select another possible upgrade from the tree.

Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo isn’t an easy game, at least not by default. It isn’t afraid to throw dozens of enemies at you at once, and when it comes to its puzzles, you’ll often have to think outside of the box to figure out how to move forward. Thankfully, Pipistrello is as lenient as it is difficult, and thanks to a range of accessibility tools, you can make the experience as easy or as tough as you want.

You see, rather than having preset ‘Easy’ or ‘Hard’ difficulty levels, Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo lets you adjust a number of parameters. You can halve the damage you receive while making yourself 2.5x stronger, if you want. You can also give yourself extra hearts, making your time with the game an absolute walk in the park. And if you do die, you’ll never lose much progress: you’ll simply need to start the current room again, losing no more than a couple of minutes of your time. Perfection.

While Pipistrello is a joy to play thanks to its unusual mechanics, it’s also utterly delightful thanks to its narrative and its writing. Characters you meet are full of spunk, and even random NPCs out in the town are worth talking to because you never know what they might say. Dialogue is often genuinely funny, and even if it doesn’t have you laughing out loud, you’ll often have a smile on your face as you play.

If you’re a fan of adventures that challenge your brain as much as your brawn, Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is for you. It’s colourful, it’s bold, and it’s unlike anything you’ve played before. Using your yoyo for battle and for puzzle solving is seriously satisfying, and simply existing in Pippit’s world is an utter joy.