Yoyos are well-known for going up and down, but Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo only goes in one direction: up. From the moment the young prodigal bat Pippit first arrives at his aunt’s spooky manor, every colorful, jam-packed screen adds to the character of the game’s corporate-run city. Every room also presents an interesting puzzle or battle, sometimes both, which is impressive given that there are hundreds of rooms. And just about every element of Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo serves to critique capitalism.
Pippit is coasting through a life of idle yoyo tournaments at the family business’s expense. He doesn’t have the makings of a conventional video game hero, though his aunt—cursed to reside within his yoyo—is unambiguously painted as a villain throughout the game. She’s nothing if not a fount of caustic observations about her wastrel nephew, and her monopoly over the city’s power has made her fabulously wealthy and increasingly controlling.
Between Pippit’s naïve notions (he’s a bit of yoyo himself) and his aunt’s profiteering perspective on the exploitative actions of the four rival businesses that cursed her, the developers at Pocket Trap are able to show both the dangers of doing nothing in the face of corporate greed and the perils of partaking in it. (One of the game’s recurring gags is that Pippit’s aunt isn’t angry at what the other corporations are doing so much as she’s upset that she didn’t think of it first.) The richness of that discourse, and the variety of the corruption depicted across each of the four distinct districts, easily carries the game across its 16 hours.
While Pippit and his aunt are the most outspoken characters in the game, the city itself has plenty to say, and each of the five main puzzle dungeons richly showcase the nightmares of corporate excess. Behold the Plaza Roquefort, a maze-like shopping mall that works to wring every cent from its visitors, and then gaze at its underbelly, an industrial mess of hazardous frying oil, the addictive ingredient in the food court’s burgers. Each zone offers a similar cautionary tale of contrasts, from a never-ending festival with a seemingly never-ending line of people to navigate through, to a sports arena that hides a manipulative sports-betting operation.
Pippit’s yoyo is the core of the gameplay here, and it delivers trick after tightly strung trick. As players progress, they’ll learn new moves that fundamentally change how Pippit can move through rooms and how he can fight his foes, whether that’s pulling off a Walk-the-Dog maneuver, such that the yoyo pulls Pippit over liquid surfaces, or throwing out an Around the World attack to keep hordes of foes at bay. Each room’s architecture comes into play as well, as your yoyo rebounds at 90-degree angles whenever it hits a diagonal surface. (This is key for both solving momentum-based puzzles and clearing out rooms with out-of-reach foes.)
Combat throughout the game is solid, for sure, but it’s a bit limited in that you can only equip two different types of special moves at once. It never ceases to be thematically cool to unleash a series of yoyo strikes or a Cat’s Cradle that tangles foe after foe, but most battles hinge more on you reacting to enemy patterns than unleashing anything more than your basic ranged attack. (It doesn’t help that you have to return to base to manually swap out skills.)
Exploration is where Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo truly excels. This is, after all, a “yoyovania”—the game’s marketing term for itself—where you use an easy-to-read map to revisit earlier areas with newer skills, figuring out how to combine moves like a Wall Run with an off-string grapple to cross seemingly impossible chasms. Moreover, the game’s devious use of capitalism in its skill tree strongly encourages you to take on side-hustles. For one, to gain any new ability, players must first take on its debt, and they’re saddled with a negative effect until they’re able to pay it off, their earnings from battle or treasure garnished (like wages) by half.
Searching for hidden, sellable diamonds or taking on extra challenges helps to clear your debt faster—even if the trap here is that no sooner do you pay off one loan than you find yourself needing to take out another, this one with even bigger gains but also more dangerous penalties. Along the way, you’ll also pick up badges that help to mitigate some of the negative effects, such as diminished HP or attack power. Finding the right combinations not only keeps the game at a steady challenge but also keeps players from getting too complacent with any one build.
Folks, Gordon Gekko had it wrong. It’s not greed that’s good, but the yoyo, which “clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit.” And if those words sound as hyperbolic as they do in Wall Street, just wait until you get your hands on Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo and see how gloriously right this weird, wonderful yoyo-centric adventure is.
This game was reviewed with a code provided by Renaissance PR.
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