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~ Estimated Reading Time: 6 min ~

To me, the GBA's appeal has always been that weird space it occupies; its games embodying the pixel art-stylings of the early 90s, while being fundamentally altered by the time between. Utterly drenched in the early 2000s look, even though most games of that era were associated with a very different shape. So it feels immeasurably fitting as an homage to that strange cultural rift of a console, that Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo would bring its difference in context to an old style by blaring samba in accurate GBA samples.

The homages to handheld play don't end at the superficial bits, though. Pipistrello was made with pick-up-and-play on the mind. It's very gauntlet by gauntlet - using pinches of difficulty to make it so clearing a few rooms feels like good work for the day. Safe rooms are placed around every corner as if you tell remind you that you can stop any time. I can only imagine it was inspired by the wave of handheld hybrids; it's one of the best and most obvious "steamdeck games" I've run into yet.

That core is what makes it stand out in the jungle of indie Zelda-likes: it exceptionally understands flow. Zelda tends to be a hazy mix of genres - all bending to support each other - this can be an incredibly difficult thing for an indie team to get right. But Pipistrello passes with flying colours; every element seamlessly compliments the other. It'll force you to think outside of a box in a puzzle, so that you can bring the same idea to your next crowded enemy encounter. The yo-yo theming is spot-on; it's about slowly building up a set of tricks that you're highly familiar with. It gives you that time to practice, so you can start feeling cool when you do it on reflex.

An important part of shortening the gap between contrasting genres is to focus on how they overlap. So they opted for puzzle-platforming over regular puzzles, that way it's universally designed around Movement. The Jump State - which (obviously :p ) jumping but also most unlockable moves put you in - is fully invincible, meaning you can aggressively push forwards in combat with all of your tricks. On the other hand, throwing out your yo-yo as a projectile will leave you with just a string, making you lose all your movement options in exchange for covering range. BUT, the string has its own strengths: whipping it has higher knockback, meaning you can shove enemies out of the ring. This would all be incidental if so many enemy encounters didn't share layouts with platforming sequences, letting you take advantage of the same pitfalls you're dodging. It all feeds into this cool balancing act that reminds me of the best of simple-but-deep NES footsies. For da real zelda 1 darknut roomheads...

Its whole world being a platforming ring lends to the game's creative energy. Pipistrello is a critique of the capitalist cities of Brazil, so it paints its world as competitive through it comprising of obstacle courses on every layer. A personal recurring favourite of mine were how all of the city streets have busy traffic. You're playing footsies-frogger all the time in Pipistrello. All of its core elements overlap through this one signature - you complete puzzles in the street's puddles, push enemies in front of in-coming vehicles. To make entering a mini-dungeon room feel like a sigh of relief in comparison gives it a very different tone from your average adventure game.

It's a tough game, and its solutions to balancing that needle are tightly knit. One thing games with express-freedom can struggle with in balancing are the dozens of upgrades you can non-linearly pick up before any challenge: it can be too easy if you over-prepare, and too hard if you miss them. The solution here was Contracts: every time you want a permanent buff, you have to pay a sum of money and give yourself an equal debuff until its paid off. The result is a game that simultaneously gives you a ludicrous amount of tools to use at once by the end, but where the difficulty curve can still breathe, steadily raising alongside you. When you die in Pipistrello, you're punished by losing a meaningful amount of your money. But your contractor will take half the money you gain until you've paid off your upgrade, meaning they'll save what you otherwise would've lost. So as you debuff yourself to higher extremes, your punishments become less severe, giving yourself the leeway to make mistakes. For a game themed around anti-capitalism, it has a pretty well-built economy, huh?

There's been an increasing genre-labeling issue of unrelated games calling themselves Metroidvanias, just because you can use metaphorical keys to open doors in a non-linear order. It scares me a little that some people would remark something like Turnip Boy, that plays literally exactly like Link to the Past, as being one. So it came to me as a surprise that Pipistrello's coining of the phrase "yo-yovania" does not feel entirely like false advertising. This is all the result of the significant focus put on every upgrade having some form of movement utility - the actual heart of Metroid's distinction - essentially reframing the entire world around you each time you find one. Throughout my playthrough was there a dozen times I ripped some puzzle in half with an obscure badge I found on the opposite side of the map, and a dozen other times I innocently did a puzzle the hard way - not knowing that I could receive some upgrade that was obviously the solution. That balance of both is exactly what makes the genre gratifying to me, so this was a surprisingly sweet surprise.

There are a bunch of nitpicks I could throw at this. Sometimes little ones, like the balancing on some move feeling a bit strong. Every indie game has to have a parry now, they're not that cool! And by the end, I started to feel things were blending together, like too many rooms lacked a personal touch. The Zelda problem: sometimes good formulas still get formulaic, though. But I don't want to blame it for being unable to solve my personal gripes with 30-year franchises, especially when the few punches it's able to pull have so much weight behind them. It still comes out on top as The People's Game, giving us close to what I wanted without contradiction or caveat. It's uplifting to see a game this genuinely large in scale rip into crypto and AI so hard, when other projects of its scale are beginning to become consistently weighed down by those elements. But on a broader and more important level than games discourse alone, it's a kinda beautiful thing to see come out of the strenuous economy for art in Brazil. As prices go up everywhere, you gotta be thankful to the devs leveraging their resources to make something genuinely ambitious. Neatly woven without a single tear. For those still looking for those handheld games that'd last you a dozen car trips, keep Pocket Trap's name in your memory.