There aren’t many upcoming games that have excited me more than Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo in recent memory. Ever since playing the demo last year I was convinced that it’d be one of my favourite video games of 2025, and getting to jump into a preview build last month only confirmed this. As someone who absolutely adored Pocket Trap’s previous title Dodgeball Academia it was always likely I’d enjoy their next creation, but Pipistrello exceeds all expectations every time I play it.
After months and months of waiting, this GBA-style “yoyovania” is finally releasing in a matter of weeks, and I can’t wait to get stuck in. Inspired by those classic portable Zelda games among other things, Pipistrello is a retro style game with creative and modern mechanics packed beyond the pixel-like surface. I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to speak to Producer and Co-founder of Pocket Trap Henrique Caprino about the run up to launch and some of the game’s clever mechanics, and this exclusive interview will only make you more excited for the end of May.
We’re finally getting close to the full release of Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo. How are you all feeling about this?
We couldn’t be more excited! We spent years developing this game, and put a lot of passion in it. The reception from the demo and events has been great so far, it’s so fun to see people catching all of our inspirations while finding out the concepts and ideas presented in the game. The demo is just a tiny appetizer of what to expect in the full game, so we can’t wait to see players discovering all the content we have in store for them.
Pipistrello is such a love letter to retro handheld gaming, which games in particular helped inspire it?
Mostly Zeldas and Castlevanias, especially from the Game Boy Advance era. We’re very fond of the GBA days and we all grew up playing these games. I personally miss playing more top-down “explor-action” games with GBA visuals and proportions, so we felt there was an opportunity to expand upon the genre and create our own take of it with a wacky theme.
In the build we played we only had access to one area of the city. How much more open is the full game, and are there any ways to tackle things out of order?
In the full game, we give the player freedom to explore two of the city’s districts at first, in the order they desire. Within those districts, there are sub-goals that you can also tackle in any order you choose, even at the cost of sacrificing some story beats if you want. After completing the goals in these initial districts, we open up the rest of the city for exploration. This sort of works like the Great Plateau in Breath of the Wild.
In our case, though, you don’t even have to complete the goals in these initial districts in order to progress, as savvy players will find out – and for which we might even have included a secret ending or not…! Throughout the game, there are also completely optional, full-fledged dungeons to discover! Not to mention well-hidden areas that offer game-breaking super-abilities. We’re quite happy with the potential for sequence-breaks, and we’re looking forward to seeing what players will come up with.
The yoyo is such a cool weapon, with a lot of unique abilities. What’s your favourite use of it?
Something you’re able to do pretty much from the start of the game is to throw the yoyo off the string and have it go around in a menacing, enemy-wrecking infinite loop! We’re already pretty proud of this mechanic, as it combines combat and level design, in a way that doesn’t feel forced or too on-the-nose. But it hardly stops there! While the yoyo is flying around, your bare string also becomes a weapon! The bare string attack allows you to stun and push enemies around, making for great pairing with the infinite loop yoyo. And that’s still not the end of it! One of the most satisfying things you can do is to skilfully grab the flying yoyo with the tip of the string, which unleashes one of the most powerful attacks in the game.
The upgrade system being loan based is really interesting. How did you come up with this idea?
I think it started with the theme and setting of the game. Since we were working with an urban-fantasy setting, we thought of ways to incorporate that and the “gangster movie” inspirations to the game design itself, beyond just the narrative. I remember telling the team how much I love Tom Nook in Animal Crossing, where you are constantly paying for your house and how it ties in with the game’s progression. A concept that made sense in our case was working with “loan sharks” and how we could create a game system related to it. After many iterations, the Upgrade Contracts system was born.
Most of the games within this genre feature skill trees and experience points of some sort. The Upgrade Contracts system shakes up this formula a bit. In our case, you “sign into a contract” and receive the upgrade immediately, but the “loan shark” takes something from you, like one (or more!) of your life points or other attributes, that you’ll only get back once you pay off the contract in full.
It’s interesting because this system also adds a new layer of choice and challenge to the player. The classical experience-based upgrade systems usually feel “parallel” to the main gameplay itself, in that the player is able to acquire new skills unrelated to their actual efforts – the experience point is a common currency to buy any upgrade. But in the Upgrade Contracts system, the player needs to plan accordingly and keep the trade-off in mind, as depending on the current area or situation they find themselves in, they might have to ponder what type of ability they can afford to temporarily forgo. The game offers multiple paths into the Upgrade tree, so you can choose the right type of load you can bear at that point.
This was one of the most unusual ideas we ever got to implement in one of our games, and iterating with it to achieve this final result was very challenging but also a lot of fun. We hope players find it as interesting and fresh when they get to experience it!
Getting to experiment with different badges in Pipistrello is a blast. What are your favourite badges?
We probably have a Badge (and a combination of Badges!) for every playstyle out there, but our favourites are the ones that truly change the base mechanics of the game – and we’re not afraid to do that! There’s a kind of “boomerang” Badge which allows the yoyo to reflect off of any surface, even plain regular walls, and that’s able to wreak absolute havoc in an arena against enemies. There are Badges that change how your regular attack works – there’s one that trades off your attack speed for huge damage power, which is super satisfying when you get skilled mowing down those baddies.
There’s another Badge that allows you to skip on the water surface, allowing you to cross lakes and whatnot very early in the game, way before you’re actually supposed to do that. Then there’s the… more well-hidden Badges. The secret ones that offer super-abilities I don’t want to spoil anything about! We haven’t spared the game of any crazy effects, haha! We included everything so players could have fun breaking the game.
Since the original demo the in-game handheld device you play Pipistrello on has changed, why is this?
We originally intended to include this feature as an homage to the handheld console of our childhoods – well, in fact, the new model still is! But after further consideration and to avoid any sort of confusion, we decided to design a different, more unique 3D model that still fulfilled this purpose, while being more coherent to the universe we created. All the features are still there – the 3D buttons respond to your controller inputs, and you can zoom out of the model, rotate the camera around, and still keep playing the game from any angle!
You can even position it so you’re hit with a giant glare from the glass panel and you aren’t able to see the screen at all anymore… If that doesn’t say “nostalgic” for pocket sized non-backlit gaming from our youth, I don’t know what does, haha!
How long do you think it will take people to complete Pipistrello?
We’re expecting players to take around 12 hours to complete the main story when just playing casually. For completionists, it could go way beyond that. It’s a big game, packed with content to the brim!
For people who want to keep playing Pipistrello, is there any extra content like a New Game Plus mode to jump into?
Yes, there is! It was already our design philosophy to empower the player with freedom of exploration and out-of-order progression during the main quest, and we’ve taken that to eleven with the New Game+ mode. In this mode, we give players a myriad of tools they aren’t supposed to have at the start of the game, so there’s enormous potential for optimizations, skips, and sequence-breaks! We hope players will have a blast with it, looking at the game with totally new eyes! Beyond that, we’ve got a bunch of difficulty settings that players can dial up or down to suit their preferences, or to spice up the gameplay with even more challenges.
Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is coming to PC, PS5, Xbox Series S|X, and Nintendo Switch on May 28th. A free demo is out now.
