Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo Review

Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is a fantastic game! I have been smiling from ear to ear while playing this game! So many fun mechanics with the yoyo and how you unlock passive abilities. It has not really any missable achievements and completion takes around 20 hours. It has some challenging achievements!

Approximate amount of time to 100%: Around 20 hours
Estimated achievement difficulty: 7/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
Is there a good guide available: Not yet, but you don’t really need a guide
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: Not really, the achievement “disregard for the Rules” is semi-missable, however you can unlock it so much easier and within 10 minutes of “New Game +”
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No, you can use the accessibility options to stop fall damage, get more health, and get more money
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No

Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is a special game in my book. You only encounter such awesome games once in a while. Everything in this game felt good: the movement, the active and passive skills, and the story. It all fits so well together and made me smile the whole time.

You play as Pipit, who is on their way to visit their auntie. When getting there, something terrible happens. Four business owners are angry at your auntie (who isn’t a saint either) and use four mega-batteries on her to get all her energy, and they tried to kill you too as a witness. However, both you and your auntie survive, but she lost her form and is now part of your yoyo. So it is up to you to learn those 4 meanies a lesson and get those mega batteries.

Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is a metroidvania. You can even choose between 2 locations at first, and when you have beaten both of those, you get to choose between the last two as well. In true metroidvania style, getting all the treasure right away is impossible. For some, you’re missing special abilities. What I find cool is that most of those new abilities come from fighting specific enemies and learning tricks from what they did to you.

What I also find very enjoyable is the way you unlock passives. You will get a loan where 50% of your rewards go toward this loan. While you have that loan, there is a penalty. For example, your attacks do less damage, or you have less health, or enemies don’t drop health anymore. Or a combination of those things. The better the passive, the harder the penalty will be, so maybe pay off a loan first before fighting a boss fight? 😛

Another fun system with upgrades is one where you have a limited amount of energy, and you choose which of those upgrades to activate, and you can switch this up. So, there are a lot of systems that work together and will give you more and more abilities while you play through the game. There are a lot of teleport spots (aka cellphones to call a taxi) to get around the map easily, and there are even more locations to go to your hideout and activate or pay off loans, change the loadout, and settings like that.

Pipistrello and the Cursed yoyo can be a very challenging game, but it has a lot of accessibility options to tailor it to the experience you want. So you can make it extremely easy or something in the middle. Even with the accessibility settings, the game will get more challenging towards the end, just because of the number of moves you can do and have to string them together to get over obstacles. Some achievements will be challenging as they don’t deal with damage or anything like that, but they do a specific task within a time limit or jump over obstacles without getting hit too much. There is an achievement that is semi-missable, and that is for moving to the north part of town without beating one of the two bosses. However, this is just so much easier and doable in 10 minutes in New Game+.

I give Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo 5 out of 5 stars. And maybe even check out that Collector’s Edition, the Pippit stuffie looks so adorable!

This review for Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo was written on 28 May 2025, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 32 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.