Pocket Trap positively charmed and won me over last summer when I laid hands and eyes on Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo. The game, which is so heavily GBA-inspired in design and execution, had the perfect little demo of dungeon-adjacent exploration, puzzle solving and some witty dialogue to make the twenty minutes just fly by in terms of play. The reps from PM Studio talked animatedly about Pipistrello, citing the influences and flushing out the fullness of the world within. Now, nearly a year later, the little bat with the haunted yoyo has finally arrived, and I still was not fully prepared for the sheer amount of material that would become available within.

And that’s how I met your mother.

The setup is one that I never fully liked and still don’t like now that the game is full fledged. You are Pippit, a nephew to the most powerful magnate in the land who controls the energy grid and, secretly, has been developing some new technology to further the outreach of her company. The new tech is a battery that’s powered by souls, and she wisely decides that it cannot be used on a moral level. Her four rivals of different industries see it differently, as the Mega Battery can push them to wealth beyond their wildest dreams. Naturally, they decide to steal it and fill four batteries with the soul of the aunt, because why not go full bad guy? Pippit interrupts the process by flinging his yoyo into the transfer stream, trapping part of Auntie’s soul in the yo-yo, but still leaving the new, soul-powered batteries fully charged.

With me so far? This seems pretty straight forward, as far as premises go. However, the rub really comes when Pippit doesn’t see the need to free his aunt from the yoyo. After all, now she can’t boss him around anymore and he gets full run of her enormous house that’s only somewhat damaged from the invasion! Madame Pipistrello wisely points out that, as long as she’s trapped in the yoyo, she isn’t making any money, and that means Pippit isn’t getting his allowance, so he’s in financial limbo. Yes, to hell with familial ties and the existential quandary of using someone’s soul to power any facet of the world, let alone the creation of more capitalistic and horrifying devices: Pippit needs his walking around money! If this bizarre embrace of money over everything upsets you, I recommend running away: the tonality never shifts and it often gets much worse.

Like…hello? Was there any consideration on people’s current mental states with certain lines?

Feelings about plot drive aside, Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is a shockingly in depth game that clearly has influence in the handheld Legend of Zelda series, particularly Minish Cap. Pippit has to defeat all four bosses to reunite his aunt’s soul, but there are metroidvania elements involved. For example, two bosses are immediately available, but it’s infinitely easier to do one before the other because of the techniques unlocked. The further along you get, the more Pippit learns to do cool tricks with his yoyo, like run across water, send it to pick up objects and unleash a flurry of quick blows in a charged attack. Even sans yoyo, Pippit also quickly learns a parry move that deflects some projectiles, which is especially valuable later on in the game.  Mechanically, the game is a fantastic success.

When I first played the game, my immediate question was an eager query about having it actually ported to GBA for the full experience. After all, my time spent with Goodboy Galaxy proved that the market for retro inspired and produced titles isn’t dead. The publishers genially indulged my question before deflecting from it, and now I can see why. As much as the polish of Pipistrello looks like a GBA game, the full meat inside would make this a monstrous title to try and re-code into the old school format, potentially even asking it to be parsed down in order to fit into a cartridge. There’s options for visual scaling, filters and different levels of zoom to emulate the 16 bit world, but there’s simply too much going on under the hood to make it a reality on another platform without sacrificing something.

Strangely, I’m in less danger here than I am just walking the streets of this game.

For example, there is never a straightforward approach to anything in Pipistrello. Not only are the levels sprawling in size, they’re packed to the rafters with additional dungeons and puzzle rooms to explore. I did my best to vet as much as I could, but there are definitely multiple petal containers (permanent life extenders) that went unfound, barriers that I never unblocked and buckets of popcorn that I couldn’t find the right place for. If the purpose of the popcorn is just to get assassinated by pigeons, then I totally nailed it, but I feel like there might be something more to it. Hell, most of the time I couldn’t even get into a boss’ lair without doing at least one fetch-quest adjacent action in order to enter the building/mall.

While this sounds intriguing and exciting, there were multiple times where the design was simply too much. When I think about oldschool titles and their difficulty, it stems from limitations of hardware and not being able to patch a game once it was out unless the patch was devastatingly bad. Here, the puzzle and room designs, not to mention the sheer amount of enemy density, comes across as overwhelming instead of challenging. It takes a lot of walking around to get Pippit’s health above the natural three heart containers, and your invulnerability window after getting hit is exceedingly small. Enemies drop health restorations, but these are infrequent compared to the amount of times you get hit. Combined with rooms where you can only make two missteps before you die, and you find yourself running out of coins (which you lose on death) and patience (which was low to begin with).

Pippit’s perennial nemesis: vehicles that brake slowly and appear out of nowhere.

So what’s a bat to do? Pippistrello solves this issue with two approaches, one excellent and one…not great. The first is the debt contract upgrade system. While you can find some items scattered across the world to improve your gameplay, the upgrade system is one where you take out a loan to add a new feature, like higher base damage or autoheal between rooms. You then get a debt and a penalty, like temporarily losing a heart. You can’t pay the debt outright: the cost is garnished from the cash you pick up from defeated enemies. Once you pay off the debt entirely, return to the safe room to clear the penalty and consider taking on a new contract.

In a game that’s massively focused on finances, this was a solid system that both made a lot of sense and was fun to explore and upgrade. Instead of just hoping I would luck into something that would make me stronger, I put in the time and effort to seek out enemies and destructible environmental items to pick up more coin and pay off my debts faster. When I found out that I could keep hitting a defeated boss and he just kept dropping money for an obscenely long time, I was giddy with excitement. This upgrade system is brilliant, especially compared to the rather banal “find badges you equip based on your BP” system that also exists. The badge system has been done to death, and I honestly never found a badge that made me feel like I was going to break through into powerful new territory.

Pay five hundred bucks and lose some health to hit harder? Oh hell yes.

Also…there’s cheats. I have no shame in telling you that Pipistrello offers you a smorgasbord of “difficulty settings” that you can access any time to increase your health, increase your damage, lessen your dropped coin and so on. I’m the kind of guy who would have been desperately searching BBS’ and Nintendo Power for codes for this game, so I don’t care that they’re available and it honestly made it so I could see more of the game in a limited amount of space. Will I go back and try and play it without cheats? Absolutely not, I have nothing to prove and it made a very challenging game go down easier and more enjoyably.  If you want to do a no yoyo blindfold run or whatever, go off, but I’m happy with an additional seven hearts to keep my head above water.

The aesthetic of Pipistrello really is top notch as well. The character design, sprite work and enemy variety is consistently awesome, with a good differentiation of mobs between boss biomes and even the changes of Pippit himself. The expression on Pippit’s face when the yoyo starting dragging him along, or the outraged looks of bosses being beaten by a bat with a toy are all wonderfully cooked up. It looks and feels great, and the scoring brings that retro aesthetic to life with a old yet new flow to the sound. There honestly could not have been a better setup for this game where, truth be told, I kind of hated the feeling of disrupting capitalists in the name of…other capitalists.

He’s like a pinata made of suffering and bad decisions!

That, I feel, is the true hallmark of what makes Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo so fantastic. I did not like the character. I did not like the quest. I did not think what I was doing was noble and I thought everyone sucked. But. The game is so well made the level of polish creates such a sheen it glosses over the mental disgruntlement I have. It’s an indisputably well made game that ticks the boxes like it was born to defy expectations. Pipistrello is daunting, but it knows what it has and never tries to pretend otherwise. Good luck, you’re definitely going to need it.

PIpistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is available now on Steam. PlayStation 4/5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo was provided by the publisher.