Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo puts a playful spin on Link’s Awakening

Every time I come to play Link’s Awakening, there’s one moment I always look forward to: getting Roc’s Feather. That first dungeon treasure can never come soon enough, as it’s the all-important item that lets Link jump about like he’s suddenly grown a pair of kangaroo legs. It’s oddly freeing in many ways – not just as a traversal tool, but the feel of it – the glide, the airtime, the speed – is just so perfectly engineered to give you pitch-perfect control over Link’s movements.

It’s a sensation that developer Pocket Trap has perfectly recreated in Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo, a top-down adventure that sees you spin, grind and leap across the screen as the young yoyo master Pippit Pipistrello, whose aunt’s spirit gets trapped in said yoyo when their home gets attacked by some shady corporate crime barons. So begins Pippit’s quest to save his family from him and take revenge on the mob bosses who are now running rife in their fair city.

In fact, Pocket Trap’s homage to Nintendo’s handheld Zelda games even goes as far as framing the whole of Pipistrello as a (completely legally distinct) Game Boy Advance cartridge that you boot up the moment you come to play it. It certainly looks the part, too, as its colorful sprites and sparky chiptune soundtrack do a brilliant job of capturing that specific era of 2D platformers, right down to the twhip-twhip sound effects that make every one of Pippit’s yoyo strikes feel just like one of Link’s sword chops.

But Pipistrello isn’t just a simple Zelda clone, and it’s all thanks to that versatile yoyo in its title. Yes, you can fling it out in front of you for close quarters combat, but many of the puzzles in the current Steam demo rely on you letting it loose from its string so it can pinball round the diagonal corners and edges of each room to hit out-of-reach switches, buttons and turnstile levers. It’s also a satisfying method of dispatching multiple enemies at range if you can line things up correctly, and mini-boss fights positively encourage these cheeky, diagonal backstabs just by the shape of their respective arenas.

There are plenty more trickshots and abilities to uncover, too, as a later segment of the game that’s available in the demo opens up Pippit’s hideout for you, which acts as both a makeshift save point mid-level, and a place where you can retool your loadout before heading out. As your central base of operations, additional family members of the Pipistrello family will congregate here over time to offer upgrades, skills and Hollow Knight-style badges that can buff or change the effect of your attacks. The latter needs to be unlocked by obtaining their respective blueprints, too, suggesting there will be plenty of treasures to seek out in among the nuts and bolts of completing each level. And as the end-of-demo trailer implies, those levels will need to be sought out by traversing and exploring the central hub world of Pippit’s home city.

It’s a promising start for this strange little bat rabbit (if anyone can suggest a better species of animal for Pippit, I’m all ears in the comments), and if the rest of the game can capture that same kind of Zelda magic that’s on display in its demo, then Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo could be quite just the trick for those in need of a little more GBA in their life right now.