I noticed a few of my friends playing Pipistrello and the Cursed Yoyo on the Switch 2, and so I decided to take a punt on this delightful retro search action game. It feels like a GBA game fell out of the sky with a few modern niceties sprinkled on top, and the writing has made me chuckle a few times in the first handful of hours. When I took a look on Steam I was pretty surprised to see a severe lack of reviews, so I wanted to spread the word for this delightful indie.
I will say that the first hour or so I was not feeling the combat and I was pretty disappointed. I stuck with it and when I was half-way through the second major dungeon (for lack of a better term), it all of a sudden clicked and now I’m hooked.
It bills itself as a search action game but I’d argue that it’s closer to a classic top down Zelda but with way more traversal mechanics. It’s pretty light on the backtracking, at least in the first handful of hours.
silverchase@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I was super impressed with the demo from Steam Next Fest last year. It’s definitely high on my list for Steam sale purchases.
One neat feature the game has, which was unnecessary but that I appreciate, is the pixel perfection settings. The game uses “soft” pixel precision by default for smooth scrolling and sharper text, but you can enable strict pixel precision, which snaps everything to the pixel grid.
hellerphant@lemmy.cafe 14 hours ago
Oh dang, I never noticed that before. Will play around with it after work and see how it feels!
silverchase@sh.itjust.works 13 hours ago
I played around with the pixel settings in the Next Fest demo. It’s honestly more of a curiosity than something that really matters, but I’m glad someone on the game thought of this. The most notable change with pixel-perfect mode is the text font becomes lower resolution to be strictly snapped to the grid. Other than that, you’ll find that the backgrounds scroll choppily. I’d imagine it would feel good that way on a smaller screen.
It’s that eternal struggle you may have seen if you play modern games with pixel art. How strictly should the game follow the grid? I think Pipistrello’s default “soft” mode is my sweet spot. Rotated and resized pixels are yucky, but I’m okay with smoother scrolling and sharper text. Celeste is that way as well.