Pipistrello is a top-down adventure where your yo-yo serves as a weapon against foes and a tool to navigate the world. You take on the role of Pippit, a quirky bat with yo-yo dreams who happens to be a lazy opportunist, depending on his affluent aunt, an energy tycoon, for support. At the beginning of the game, she merges with your yo-yo after four major villains swipe her Mega Batteries, and you set off on a quest to retrieve them and liberate her.

The game exudes charm. Pippit is an endearing goof, and you’ll embark on absurd tasks like gathering a group for a soccer fan club to gain easier entry to a stadium controlled by a shady boss promoting gambling. The pixel art is superb, reminiscent of the GBA games I recall, though I played Pipistrello on my modern Steam Deck OLED screen. For those craving a nostalgic vibe, there’s a mode that replicates the GBA’s graphics, complete with a faux handheld frame surrounding the game.

Pocket Trap, the game’s developer, makes Pippit’s yo-yo more than just a toy. It’s also good for bashing enemies, of course. But you can even chuck the yo-yo off the string to hit enemies at range or spin it around you to keep them at bay. And as you progress, you’ll get additional yo-yo-themed moves that will help you more easily fend off baddies, explore the city that the game takes place in, and solve puzzles. Many of the moves are based on actual yo-yo tricks: the walk the dog move, for example, sends the yo-yo surging forward, yanking Pippit along so he can cross bodies of water.

The game also has a very good skill tree with a contract-based system. When you pick up a contract, you have to work off a money debt and deal with some kind of penalty until you pay back the contract in full, like losing a heart or some attack power. The system forces you to be thoughtful about which contract to take on and helps keep you from becoming overpowered too quickly.

Not that you should really worry about getting too strong, though. I found that Pipistrello was really difficult, especially early on. Pipistrello has a lot of combat, and enemies frequently overwhelmed me. There’s not a huge penalty for dying — you just lose some coins and can tackle the room again — but some rooms were still pretty tough and took multiple tries to finish.

Fortunately, Pipistrello has a very flexible difficulty system that lets you tweak things like your attack power or how many coins enemies drop. You can even nullify fall damage. As I played, I frequently messed around with the options to help smooth over some particularly tricky sections.

I’ll admit that by the end of my nearly 10-hour playthrough, I often made myself invincible so that I could more quickly see the rest of the story, the puzzles, and the platforming. The combat rooms became too much of a time suck for me. But even though the enemies posed no danger, I still had a blast yo-yoing them to death. And I still had to figure out puzzles on my own, too, so it’s not like I made the game a total walk in the park.

If you’re feeling nostalgic for the pixel graphics and blaring horns of GBA games, Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo scratches that itch — and has some clever new ideas, too. It won’t actually make you better at using a yo-yo, but it’s pretty darn fun to have one in a video game.

^{Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is available now on Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation, and Xbox.}