Brazilian indie studio Pocket Trap is no stranger to genre mashups, but Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo might be their most chaotic concoction yet. Launching May 28, 2025, for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam, the game blends GBA-era nostalgia with an urban crime story, all told through the lens of a dude flinging around a cursed yoyo. It’s a bold pivot from the studio’s last title, Dodgeball Academia, trading turn-based schoolyard brawls for top-down exploration and physics-driven action.

We spoke with Henrique Caprino, producer and co-founder of Pocket Trap, about the game’s unlikely beginnings, its GBA roots, and how a love for gangster films and skate culture collided into a “Yoyovania” with personality to spare. From dungeon design to breaking the game on purpose, Caprino walks us through how Pipistrello became more than just a gimmick with string.

Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is launching on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam on May 28, 2025.

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Henrique Caprino: Haha, that’s a great question to get it started! We usually start developing our games from interesting mechanics and relatable ideas. Pipistrello was no different – we knew we wanted to make a game that was reminiscent of the GBA era, with Zelda and Castlevania themes in mind.

At first, we thought about making some sort of vampire story, so that’s where the bat characters came from. “Pipistrello” is the Italian word for “bat”, by the way! It’s such a fun word, we had to use it!

After we started prototyping and messing around with the yoyo mechanics, we began thinking of what kind of narrative and characters we could fit that in with. I’m a big fan of “gangster movies” and I knew some members of the team wanted to tackle the possibility of having an urban setting in a “Zelda-like” game, so I threw around some mob/crime family concepts and we started putting stuff together.

We love making silly characters and messing with absurd themes. We mostly try to go with themes aimed at kids, but that adults can also relate to. So we thought: what if instead of creating a legendary hero for our adventure, we went with a protagonist that’s a spoiled kid with a yoyo fixation? A kid who’s part of the biggest family business in the city, but doesn’t care about any of it. His auntie is the chief of operations, an ultra-powerful and influential mafia boss, and she absolutely hates that her nephew is “wasting” his time with the silly toy. Then he ends up getting caught in the plot by accident anyway. Auntie gets trapped inside the very yoyo she despises, inverting all power dynamics. Subverting the characters’ natural states makes for really great character development moments – and funny bickering! That’s how we arrived at the current narrative.

Auntie became sort of the main character’s companion, like Navi in Ocarina of Time, but more fleshed-out and interesting. Besides, what’s better than a yoyo? A cursed one, of course!

You’re absolutely right regarding our references, haha! We knew working with these themes would be quite challenging but this urban setting also presented cool new opportunities. We started by studying and breaking the fundamentals of the genres that inspired us: Metroidvanias
and Zelda games. So we knew the game had to feature: an open world to explore, dungeons, and unlockable skills to tie the progression together.

After that we started to work alongside the narrative to think of the craziest themes for these dungeons and crime bosses. We were trying to have all themes be grounded in reality, to be as relatable as possible to the modern world. So our characters include fast-food overlords, natural-resource plunderers, and even sports-betting magnates! Themes decided, we came up with the concepts for their city districts, which would become the game’s main regions. Every dungeon puts a spin on a cliché adventure element – so instead of hazardous (but boring) bodies of water, we have giant frying-oil pools and bottomless petroleum deposits, matching each boss’s line of work! Last but not least, we developed and distributed the yoyo skills which would be linked to the obstacles and progression. The yoyo is very versatile and can even be used for skate-like traversal deeper into the game!

Once you have a deep understanding of the genre, its challenges and demands, it starts to become easier to fit almost any theme on top of it. The urban setting and the yoyo brought unique ideas that could become gameplay elements, like bouncing the yoyo around the environment, dodging cars on the street and even in progression-related mechanics like the Upgrade Contracts system, where you take on debt.

 We did end up having a bunch of mechanics that quite literally broke the game, but in the most fun ways possible. Although, things like sequence-breaking became easy to do, and it was difficult incorporating that chaos in well-balanced challenges throughout the story. But instead of taking all of that fun out of the game completely, we took another page from the games of old – we left these super-abilities in as a bonus! Now, I don’t want to spoil this part of the game too much, so what I can say is: there are especially-well-hidden areas scattered around the city (and the sewers!) which will grant you these game-breaking abilities if you’re able to unravel their secrets. We hope everyone will keep an eye out for clues to these places!

I think Pippit is exactly the kind of “hero” we needed for the silly urban adventure we wanted to tell. We were all imperfect teenagers like Pippit one day, and we also wanted to bring this “nostalgic” feeling to a lot of aspects of the game. It is represented in the visuals, the yoyo, and the GBA we used to play with. Characters with issues and room to grow and evolve are usually the ones we love to work with and make players relate to. As you explore the city and become a better player, Pippit is also growing alongside you both as a yoyo master and a human being. (Or a “bat being”? Haha.)

HC: It was of great importance! We knew we wanted to capture the nostalgic vibes of the GBA, but instill it with fresh and modernized feelings from the get-go. We knew that to achieve this nostalgic sensation, we had to design the game with visuals and dimensions that were very similar to the GBA’s specs. It was very fun to work within these restrictions, but without having to worry about real hardware limitations, haha.

So with all this extra hardware power, and a healthy dose of respect for the player’s time, we moved to incorporate fast-paced, modern mechanics into the game. It wasn’t always like this, though! Lots of player feedback was key here. If it weren’t for our early playtest sessions, we’d still be forcibly respawning you at a Safe House every time you die, requiring you to replay the same stretches of gameplay over and over. If we could nail the “nostalgic shell” of the game, we knew we’d be free to expand upon the other departments, like game design and controls.

One of our goals was to make a game that could connect generations who lived the GBA era with younger audiences who never had the chance to play the games that inspired us. We want kids nowadays to feel what we felt when we were playing those games the first time. But none of that would stick if the players didn’t like playing our game. A big part of our modernizations comes as refinements to the player’s controls – things like coyote-time, but also some of our own innovations, like corner-sliding, landing assist, and magnetic edges. We’ve also got an array of difficulty and accessibility options for players to fine tune their experiences, and maybe even put the game into hard mode if desired.

Pipistrello is a love letter to classic games, but we weren’t trying to copy them. We wanted to build upon everything we loved about the classics, and put our own twists to what we thought didn’t work so well for modern audiences.

Azario Lopez: Coming off Dodgeball Academia, this feels like a genre swerve. Was shifting into chaotic action territory a conscious decision to break away, or just where your instincts took you?

HC: It was a very conscious decision, haha. We loved working on Dodgeball Academia and some might think the obvious choice would make our next game in a very similar style… But that’s not exactly true in our case. Production times for our games take years, so we’re usually very tired of it when we are close to the end of development. So after Dodgeball we knew one thing for sure: we didn’t want to make back-to-back RPGs, haha! They’re very challenging to design and balance, not to mention involving a ton of work related to the narrative and cutscenes.

When we started thinking about prototyping our next game, we wanted to work with something that felt “lighter” and brought us joy. A game that we would absolutely love to play, inspired by things we loved. We felt like the design space for top-down Zelda-likes still had a lot of unexplored areas. Plus, we enjoy making action-platforming games, so we started from there.

Azario Lopez: You’ve had the demo out in the wild at PAX and Steam events. What’s something players immediately clicked with that caught you off guard, and what’s something you expected to land but got silence?

HC: We were more than surprised to see that many players immediately understood the intro story’s subtext. They could see through when characters were being evasive, when they lied, and they could tell what they were going to do next. We really don’t make these things obvious! But it’s a blast seeing the reactions in person and in online streams – people act out the dialogue, laugh, and call out all the dirty tricks underlining the characters’ motivations.

As for something that didn’t land quite well… It seems nobody can tell he’s a bat just by looking at him. Haha! The most common description is that he’s a rabbit. Do you think Coniglio and the Cursed Yoyo also has a ring to it?

Azario Lopez: Do you see Pipistrello becoming a playground for speedrunners and glitch-hunters? Are you into that kind of chaos, or quietly dreading what people might do with your systems? Is there anything you’d like to say to those waiting to play Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo, or hearing about for the first time?

HC: We’re not only into that chaos, but we crave it! We purposefully built the game to support these community efforts. For speedrunners, we have built-in game timers and automatic time splits. And we’d be stoked to see what glitch-hunters will be able to find! There’s a special kind of joy about having your own creation break like this, haha!

We’ve also designed our systems to be intricately intertwined and allow for a myriad of routing possibilities – for example, every one of our overworld item pick-ups works within the physics engine and is able to be carried around to other rooms, far beyond what traditional game design would allow. You can pick up a key in one district and bring it all the way over to another, and it will open the locks there just the same. The game has been carefully modeled so that this isn’t confusing to newcomers, while still offering huge potential for unforeseen interactions to advanced players.

For those who are hearing about Pipistrello for the first time, I want to extend a personal invitation for you to try the game! It packs years of meticulous considerations, iterations upon iterations, refinements to every system, in an effort to amuse, inspire, and impress the most important part of our work: you, the player. Pipistrello is a game that breaks the mold, and will surprise you in multiple ways. We couldn’t be more proud to be able to offer a game like this – a game that we, as gamers, would like to play ourselves. Try the demo today on Steam, Nintendo Switch, or PlayStation, and catch the full version when it releases on these and more platforms on May 28th!