#pipistrello

Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo feels like a lost Game Boy Advance game or like a world where Zelda never left the glorious 2D planes. The art is cute and they do some really impressive lighting tricks on the sprites. It has a great main character (he is apparently a bat, not a beetle). And the soundtrack is a bop. This game has charm out the wazoo. The dialogue in the intro kind of drags on too much, but once you’re passed that, it too gets fun. I really appreciate that up front they immediately let you know that the Pipistrello family are a bunch of bad guys too. Sure, there are BAD bad guys, but your family are a bunch of greedy jerks as well.

The puzzles start out pretty fun. It’s more about movement than Zelda-style pushing blocks. You’ll frequently enter a room and then have to mentally work backwards to figure out how you get over a pit or pick up a battery/key and safely make it back. It’s satisfying once you plot out the course of your jumps and bouncing your yoyo off the walls.

I also frequently didn’t know WHY I was completing a puzzle/area until after I’d finished it. Entering new areas or dungeons has a lot of wandering around aimlessly while you complete tasks. Keys don’t go into an inventory, you have to manually carry them around, and that affects your combat and movement abilities. So finding a key but not knowing where it needs to go is actually a hassle. You don’t know why you’re doing the puzzles because you haven’t seen your goal/objective yet, but you’re making some kind of progress on this unknown mission. There’s a mini “dungeon” involving Pipitt raiding a police station to get a government ID. I wasn’t sure why I was doing it, but it was fun. After completing the area, the characters happily exclaim they can now get through the guard checkpoint! I had no idea what they were talking about. Then after walking around a bit more, I discovered a barrier I couldn’t get past without an ID. It all makes sense after the fact, but it’s always nice to know what your goal is before jumping through all those hoops. Zelda was usually good about that. They show you an objective and you then have to find out how to reach it. Pipistrello frequently gives you a key and then you wander around until you find the door.

It can be hard to tell what you can interact with. Which people can you talk to versus the ones you can’t, the buttons on the ground don’t really look like buttons, having to scan every house to see which ones you can enter because the doors don’t stand out much. The map isn’t particularly great, but I found myself constantly looking at it not because I was lost, but to see if there were important objects I’d walked past.

There are encounters that sound like quests or things you can interact with, only to find they lead to nothing. Like early in the game, you meet a guy that wants a hamburger, which is an item you can buy. You go to the restaurant, buy him one, deliver it, and he gives you items in return. Later in the game, you meet a person that wants popcorn, which is an item you can buy. You go to the shop, buy them one, deliver it, and... nothing happens. They just repeat their dialogue about wanting popcorn. Don’t have a character mention an item you can buy and deliver if it’s just incidental dialogue. Pick any of the thousands of other foods that aren’t in the game!

You can combine your abilities in some really unintuitive ways. It doesn’t feel like an “a-ha!” moment when you figure it out, it just doesn’t make sense so you don’t feel good. You can combine the dash with a lot more than you’d expect. You don’t even need to be on the ground to use it. That feels like the kind of thing the game could be better about explaining to you.

I got completely stuck at one point and had to look up online how to progress. It was just a new way to use a power that seems counter-intuitive to how you’d always used it in the past. Bouncing a hard yoyo off blocks makes sense to me. Bouncing a string does not make sense to me.

The game has a neat upgrade system. You take on a contract for an upgrade and immediately get it, but it comes with a penalty. They’re usually things like lowering your max health, how much equipment you can have on, and lowering your attack, but there are rougher ones that prevent healing items from dropping and such. When you have an active contract, half of all the money you make goes towards paying off the debt, but once you’ve paid it off and returned to the safe house, the contract is paid, you keep the upgrade, and all the penalties are wiped clean. Until you take the next contact and start the process over. It lets you make choices in fun ways around what you can give up at that moment or what you’ll need. If you’re bopping around the city, take the highest penalty contracts, but if you’re in a dungeon, go for an easier one until you know what kinds of enemies you’re up against.

I really enjoyed the first half of the game. And then you get to the second half and, ugh. There’s one area that has a giant map and you need to wander around trying to find some specific people. The map is huge to start with and then there’s a whole sewer system under it and lots of paths are blocked or one-way streets. And there’s constant traffic above ground so you can’t just walk one place to another easily because you’re dodging cars. And the enemies keep respawning. And it’s stupidly not clear what’s a puzzle or gets you closer to finding the people, what’s a path you need to come from another direction for, or maybe something is a puzzle but you don’t have the right upgrade to tackle it now. Just an absolutely awful area that sucked all the enjoyment out of the game. Then that’s not even the end of this section, it’s just how you open the boss’s actual dungeon.

The final areas of the game aren’t as bad as this section, but it never gets back to being fun again. They just leaned towards everything becoming annoying. Your path moving through areas is constantly blocked so you’re jumping in and out of the sewers to get around things, or there are a ton of the Zelda switch puzzles where you need to find switches to move blocks up/down to get through an area and those have never been enjoyable. Even the actual yoyo puzzles stop being “how can I get through here” and become “I know what I need to do but it’s really frustrating to execute on it”. Or you’ll enter a room and just not know what the game wants from you so you can’t start figuring how to plan a route. Trying to carry an item across the bouncy hooks just feels like total trial and error. Sometimes, you latch onto the hook and continue holding the item. Most times, Pipitt throws the item away, it falls down the pit, you quickly follow it, and you have to start the puzzle all over again.

There are a lot of fetch quest-y kind of encounters. You head out to where you think you should go, find you need an item/person, go back a few screens, do a thing to get the necessary widget, and then head back to where you were originally going. Wandering around the overworld isn’t a lot of fun. Pipitt walks pretty slow and there’s not much to do once you’ve opened up the paths, so you’re just retreading ground for no good reason. This seems like one of those times that linearity would make the game more enjoyable. I’d rather have smaller areas that are faster to traverse and go from puzzle to puzzle rather than having to walk around the hubs. The single room puzzles are where the game shines, but putting them all together into a dungeon that requires a lot of traversal and backtracking makes the whole less than the sum of its parts.

My major piece of advice if you’re going to play the game is to find all the “Cheater’s Badge” equipment as soon as you can after clearing the first two dungeons. They make the game so much less frustrating and even make Pipitt walk faster. I left collecting them until I’d finished all the bosses and was doing cleanup on collecting badges but that was a huge mistake. Just search on Youtube for them and it makes the game much more enjoyable just having the higher walk speed and ability to steer the dash. Having the power to summon your yoyo back to you instead of having to sit there and wait for a timer to tick down alone alleviates so much tedium.

The game starts to chug the more you play it. It ran just fine when I started playing, but about two-thirds of the way through, it would hitch up after large groups of enemies spawned in or when destroying multiple enemies and they all spawned money. After playing some more, now it also stutters every time it auto-saves, when changing screens, and sometimes for no discernible reason. It’s extra annoying because every time it stutters, it eats your button inputs so it will cause you to fall into pits, take damage in fights, or screw with puzzles. Even totally quitting the game and relaunching doesn’t fix it, so it’s not an issue of using the rest mode or leaving it running too long.

The game has some fantastic Fun/Accessibility options. Changing how much damage you do, how hard enemies hit, removing damage from pits, and so on. I totally applaud developers that put in that kind of work. The options also help you get around some of the game’s frustrations. There’s so much combat in the game. It happens too often and there are too many enemies in each encounter. I boosted my attack pretty early in the game to speed up the encounters and never looked back.

Also, so so sooo many enemies in the game are positioned near pits and water, so when you beat the enemy, all their money drops into the hole and disappears. Jack up the option for how much money enemies drop to save yourself the anger of seeing most of your cash vanish down a pit. It’s like the coins purposefully bounce away from you and into the water! There’s a piece of equipment that will cause money to magnetize to you, but it’s one of the most hidden items in the game so I didn’t find it until I was about to tackle the game’s final dungeon. You don’t have to solve a puzzle to find it, it’s just hidden in a spot that’s covered up so you wouldn’t think to walk back there.

Zootopia if it was peak

Pippit's regular world form would be a bat plushie, and his Wonder would be his yoyo (obviously), which could stretch and extend to absurd lengths.

Pippit and Docky would definitely be rivals, with both of them competing for title of "Coolest Kid in School."

Cuca Carrara would probably be banned from the school grounds after trying to sell stuff to students and/or get them to gamble.

Don Mauretti would try to get a job as the school cook, but the students would still prefer the food from the vending machines over his.

Toxy would probably try to insert herself into Liddy and Onpoo's friendship since they all like music, but she'd be so clingy and annoying that they'd just dump her.

In 2023 I wrote 72k words about 125 games. In 2024 I wrote 135k words about 145 games. In 2025 I wrote 172k words about 194 games. Winnowing down a top 10 list becomes intensely difficult when it’s about 5% of what you’ve played, but that’s the point of a top 10. It’s going to have some hard choices and some also-rans. I have a dozen honorable mentions, each of which I think of highly and each of which I could easily convince myself deserves a slot above the entries which I do comment on.

As always, the end of year retrospective is more about the thoughts that I’ll carry forward about that game than its raw quality. I value ambition, creativity, and cleverness over execution. Money can buy raw quality. Time can polish a turd. Neither can replace the effervescence of a game that was very clearly loved by someone who was making it. Games like Clair Obscur or Ghost of Yotei are good in the same way a well-paved and conveniently placed road is good; sure it gets you where you need to go but it chokes the life out of the ecosystem and any stretch of it is going to be about the same.

Games are presented in the order I played them with no relative ranking intended nor implied.

Honorable Mentions: BLADECHIMERA, FlyKnight, Khimera: Puzzle Island, Fountains, BURGGEIST, Nocturnal, Xanthiom Zero, Angel’s Gear, Side Scape, Abiotic Factor, Hypogea, Possessor(s)

Zexion – At this point, regardless of where one draws the lines in the genre, I have played well over 100 metroidvanias. There’s no getting around the fact that I enjoy looking for shit, and that process gets applied recursively where I look for a lot of games in which I can look for shit. Through that meticulousness, I see the eddies of design philosophies ripple through the pond, ideas and mechanics percolating and being constantly recycled. In that way, it can be refreshing to see a game that starts and ends with Metroid 1. Certainly there’s more than that; the map is sprawling, the bosses complex and intensely difficult, the weapons unique with a variety of bespoke interactions, and some modern amenities for quality of life (with many more in the options for accommodation’s sake). But the heart is the same – a complete trust that the player can and will figure this nonsense out, and that all they need is a gun, a jump button, and a continue button for when they inevitably get smeared onto a cave wall. It almost makes me forget about the fact I only bought this game initially because it’s named after a dude in Organization XIII.

Polimines 1 and 2 – In grade school I was a big fan of Zebra puzzles, the grids of labeled columns and rows with hints as to which categories aligned (the man in the green shirt lives next to a blue house, etc.). I should’ve figured at some point I’d get deep into esoteric grid-based puzzles based on counterfactuals and derived information, but it took me a while after Master Key reignited my love for picross. Polimines is where I truly started to understand how much this is my flavor of bullshit. Shoutouts also to Tametsi but Polimines 2 is truly something special. I’ve clustered these because 1 is essentially an extended tutorial for 2, and I’m desperately hoping for a third.

Cosmobreeder Yiffai – I’m not going to beat around the bush, this is a game made by a furry porn artist and even without the lewd patch it’s both unapologetically horny and xenophilic. It’s also one of the best metroidvanias of the past five years. Mechanically it’s taking a lot from classic Castlevania, but it’s taking just as much from Metal Gear. The codec system is a perfect way of infusing banter and lore into a metroidvania while maintaining an air of isolation, and the tone is consistently lighthearted. Everything has a charm to it; no one’s in serious danger, the jokes flow well, and it’s just a matter of personal taste if you’re okay with the fact that they’re discussing how fuckable the local fauna is. The gameplay itself is rock-solid; the map is dense and interesting, the overworld gives a sense of space while rewarding progress within each sub-area with access to fast-travel, abilities are powerful and feel good to use. There’s some stiffness from the deliberate retro feel, and some gripes with the controls for similar reasons, but ultimately I found that added to the charm. I just wish I could review the game without needing to remove my uncle from my steam friends.

Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo – A Link to the Past is maybe my single favorite video game, and my time with it informs how I think about damn near every 2D action-adventure game I play. Most of them, including many actual Zelda games, are found wanting. What a surprise then that Pipistrello hits it out of the park. The yo-yo is used in endlessly clever ways; a basic melee strike, ricocheting off of slanted walls, launching off the string to hold down buttons, rolling to carry the player along… It all ties back to a singular tool in a way that feels flexible rather than centralizing. I also am a big fan of the loan system for upgrades; you get the upgrade immediately, but there’s collateral in the form of a debuff (reduced max HP, reduced badge points, etc.) and half of any money you earn is paid into the loan. It creates an interesting rhythm to the economy, though it doesn’t mesh cleanly with losing money on death. Small burrs aside, it’s an absolute joy to move in this game, the dungeons are all interesting, and overall the experience shines.

Metro Gravity – I hadn’t even played this for a half-hour before knowing it was a lock for my top 10. The use of 3D space is truly unlike anything else with the variety of gravity-shifting abilities, and the graphics used the low-poly aesthetic to give a dreamlike and metaphorical veneer to the environment. Even when I felt clumsy with my momentum or confused about how to move in the space, that felt like room for mastery rather than friction with the mechanics. Where I did run into problems were the bosses. They are extremely punishing rhythm games where strictly speaking you need only survive until the end of the song to pass. However, to score you need to attack and maintain a combo, and keeping the correct spacing without relying on attacks is difficult. I feel bad for falling off after 7 hours at what felt like the midpoint, but I also adored my time with the game and would rather be wistful than frustrated.

Afterplace – Like many “gamers” I pay essentially zero attention to the mobile gaming space. I’ll play sudoku while waiting at the dentist, that’s about it. As such, I’m not surprised I hadn’t heard of Afterplace before it was on Steam. Everything else about it surprised me. It starts off seeming like a fairly rote Zelda clone but soon shows its strengths with the incredibly dense non-Euclidean map, an interesting setting, and characters that are simple but endearing. I wish I could predict why some games like this resonate with me and I bounce immediately off of others, but this one definitely was a hit.

The Axis Unseen – For a decade I have said that all I want out of video games is a bow, a big fuckoff dungeon full of enemies and treasure, and just enough structure that I can figure out which direction is forward. The Axis Unseen has a sprawling hinterland of skeletons and fire rather than a dungeon, but everything else is like I’d always dreamed. Sneak around the forest and shoot chupacabra in the dick. Get launched into the air by a boar and turn yourself into to stone so that your landing deletes him. Experience the joy of trying to shoot an enemy that you can only see from the corner of your eye with a bow that only aims straight ahead. Perfect video game.

Hollow Knight: Silksong – It’s Silksong, what do you want from me. Team Cherry made one of the best video games of all time and decided as a victory lap to do it again. I could write a novel on my opinions about the game and its structure, but at the end of the day the only real problem I have with Silksong is that it’s signed us up for another decade of Hollow Knight clones.

Pokemon Legends: Z-A – Of my entire top 10, this one in some ways is the hardest to defend. The game runs atrociously even on the Switch 2. It’s set entirely in a city where 90% of the buildings look the same, and the textures of those buildings would be embarrassing on PS2. The experiment of real-time combat is as much misses as hits; positioning is clumsy, cooldown management is a joke, the inconsistent hitboxes and attack angles based on model size feel less like strategic decisions and more unpredictable jank. The story and characters are fairly weak, and do a poor job both of following up on the story of X/Y or serving as a Legends game. But despite those flaws, there are some ways in which is this the best Pokemon has ever been. Pidgey flit from lamppost to lamppost. Goomy linger on the docks when its raining. You can walk around the city with your pokemon and go on little coffee dates. There’s more sidequests than there need to be but the best of them are exactly the sort of vignettes about daily life that people have wanted from a pokemon game ever since seeing the anime. I love the glimmers here of what Pokemon games could be, and with the right bits from Arceus, S/V, and Z-A there could truly be something special. For right now I’m not going to pretend those glimmers are worth the price of admission for most folks.