If you’re not familiar with the work of Brazilian developer Pocket Trap, now might be a good time to start, as their latest game Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is a masterclass in top-down 2D creativity and inventiveness. This is Pocket Trap’s third game, after the enjoyable beat-’em-up Ninjin: Clash of Rabbits and the excellent Dodgeball Academia and I’ll be honest: I thought Dodgeball Academia would be tough to beat but Pipistrello shows that Pocket Trap knows exactly what they’re doing across different art styles and genres.

Pipistrello is a top-down 2D Zelda-style game that is self-described as a yoyovania. The GBA-inspired visuals make it feel like it’s some long lost game of the era along the lines of Drill Dozer. You control Pippit, the trust fund nephew of his corporate auntie, who winds up running afoul of some unsavory crime bosses. Pippit’s aunt’s soul is split across a bunch of mega batteries and she winds up becoming fused with Pippit’s yoyo in a weakened form. From there, Pippit and his yoyoed aunt travel around the city to bring his aunt back to full strength and save her company and the city.

Each boss has their own district that more or less functions as a separate section of the overworld, though everything is interconnected. At the start, you have the Breath of the Wild-esque option to go in multiple directions and at first, it seems relatively straightforward. You head into a new area and go find the dungeon to then take out the crime boss. But each district is absolutely jam-packed with all sorts of nooks, crannies, and secrets. The yoyo is a nice little ranged attack and also a versatile movement tool. In short order, your movement expands to bouncing around walls, stringing together different maneuvers, and unleashing a ton of damage on oodles of foes. You’re tossing your yoyo. You’re riding your yoyo. You’re whirling it around all over the place.

In typical Metroidvania fashion, a lot of the areas are initially gated by certain moves, though this game manages to make the acquisition of abilities a little nonlinear. Crossing water, for example, is largely restricted by your progress in the story. But some other obstacles can be overcome in a variety of ways across different moves and abilities. My rhythm with the game followed a relatively consistent pattern throughout as I’d somewhat beeline it to the district dungeon and then clean up as much as I could in the area before moving on to the next. While exploring the world and scouring for various challenges and secrets is awesome, the combat becomes repetitive and stale over the course of the game. The variety of power-ups and abilities you find can help you rely less on regular ol’ yoyo attacks, but kill rooms pop up with frequency. Sometimes it’s almost a puzzle in itself to figure out the best way through enemies, but other times it’s just frustrating. Thankfully, the checkpointing is very friendly even if you suffer a monetary loss when you die.

Some of the challenges you clear reward you with pickups that slowly but surely raise your health or badge points. Badge points can be used to equip a handful of the dozens of badges that boost your abilities or grant different boons and bonuses. All of those badges can also be upgraded to be more effective or require less badge points to equip. In addition to that, you also have persistent upgrades you can add in a quirky unique way. You can do something like increase your attack power, but you initially go into debt to pay off the ability. While you accrue the money to pay back the loan, you have to deal with a drawback, like one less hit point or no health refill drops from enemies. It’s a weird system, but the push and pull made even regular exploration and travel through the overworld more interesting as I considered when would be a more opportune time to take on a certain malady.

Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is another grand slam of a game from Pocket Trap. This is a brilliantly designed top-down adventure that is one of the best 2D Zelda-esque indie games of the entire Switch era. My teeny-tiny complaints only lie with the combat, but the delightful puzzles and joyous yoyo parkour more than make up for some occasionally tiresome battling. We might be days away from the Switch 2, but be sure not to miss this absolute gem of a game.