Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo
When you boot up the game, Pipistrello shows you a fairly accurately modeled GBA as a cartridge with the game's title descends and inserts into the system. It zooms into the screen, plays the developer logo with an almost identical GBA boot up sound, before finally loading into the title screen. If you go more than 5-ish seconds without touching any buttons, the entire camera pulls back to show the GBA model again, with Pipistrello running on the screen.
If that isn't a statement of developer intent, then I don't know what is.
Released in May 2025, Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo is a game that lives in the gray area between Zelda and Metroid - while the two are distinct, there's a lot of shared ideas and language between them, and Pipistrello is laser-targeted at this fuzzy gray area. If we go strictly by the books, the game is pure Zelda, taking more than its fair share of inspiration from, say, The Minish Cap. The overworld is broken up into four main chunks, each of which has a main "dungeon" complete with maps, keys, puzzles, and a new ability that recontextualizes the area and how you interact with it. However, since you play as a kid with a yo-yo, instead of getting new items, you instead learn new tricks that perform the same function - and these new tricks almost always double as movement tech. One of the most basic tricks allows you to push yourself away from a wall by attacking it with your yo-yo (which you can do repeatedly if there are more walls to keep hitting), while "Walk the Dog" is great for moving quickly in one direction (like the Pegasus Boots), but it ALSO allows you to run on top of water. The UFO trick allows you to detach your yo-yo and use it as a portable grapple point, and you can eventually learn a wallride technique to cross large gaps by grinding along the sides. While I would hesitate to outright call Pipistrello a "platformer," it is inarguable that it contains a whole lot of platforming and it is not afraid to make you do a bunch of tricks in quick succession. In this aspect, at least, we're definitely closer to the Metroid end of the scale.
As far as the actual plot goes, you play as Pippit, the nephew of Madame Pipistrello - the mayor of the city and head of Pipistrello Industries, the energy corporation that effectively runs the town. One night, she gets attacked by a few of the local businessmen who use a machine to absorb her soul and put it into four "megabatteries," each of which can be used to generate effectively infinite energy. Pippit interrupts this by throwing his yo-yo into the beam, saving a portion of her soul and effectively turning her into his Navi as he gets tasked with tracking the down the batteries and putting his dear aunt back together again. Along the way, he sees what the four are doing with the batteries they stole, how his aunt's policies led to this happening in the first place, and generally does a bunch of soul-searching about how terrible his aunt is along the way. It's...fine, I guess. A little heavy-handed in places, especially with some of the "pastiches" that pop up - but in a good way, if that's possible? More things should just unequivocally state that sports gambling is fucking garbage.
Beyond that, I have very little to actually say about the game? Like, I could talk about how the dungeons are taking heavy inspiration from the Wind Waker/Minish Cap era of Zelda; they do a lot of looping around to make sure that you're not backtracking too badly, and some of the later dungeons have a heavy Twilight Princess influence by sending you back through the same hub room over and over. It's perfectly adequate - nothing special, but it does nothing egregiously wrong either. The sprites are big and chunky, and while I'm not a HUGE fan of the art style, they are absolutely period-appropriate and animated very well. The secrets hidden around the overworld are nightmarish to hunt down, extremely reminiscent of Zero Mission's absurd shinespark challenges. I'm sure they're a lot of fun for the right person, but I just found them tedious to hunt down.
And the whole game is like this, broadly speaking: a perfectly fine 8/10 experience that I definitely enjoyed but came away with absolutely no strong opinions about. It's one of those games where you take one look at it and instantly know whether or not it's something that you'd like. Everything it does, it does adequately - but it does nothing spectacularly, in a way that really sticks with you. For $20 you could certainly do far worse, but I don't I could offer much besides theming if someone asked me to sell them on it. If that's enough for you, then it's absolutely worth a try. Beyond that, maybe wait for a sale? For $10-15 I would give it a much stronger recommendation.