Yapyap is a jolly bit of gang wizard vandalism with a touch of Dark Messiah

Yapyap stands apart from other “friendslop” horror extraction games by giving you plenty of firepower to begin with. Airpower, anyway. You and up to four mates are the boggle-eyed, flap-jawed minions of an enormous, moon-masked wizard. You’ve been summoned to wreak havoc on a rival wizard’s procedurally generated tower. Over the course of three nights per round, you must smash as many fixtures as you can to fill up your quota of Chaos – tapestries, crates, paintings, statues, anything that isn’t nailed down. For this purpose, you are handed a range of magical artefacts.

Some of the artefacts have to be bought with gold, but there’s a tree in the game’s lobby area that grows wands of wind magic, pluckable for free. Wind magic is the Ringo Starr of the four elements, IMO, but the default wands are fun, especially given that you have unlimited mana. There’s a basic ‘Force Push’ style wind spell, used to blow the helmets off zombie knights, a levitation spell to enhance your parkour, and a summonable tornado that will happily engulf the caster.

The twist is that you’re asked to actually speak the incantation into your microphone, though there’s a text wheel option, if you’re too cool to yell “AERO” within earshot of other humans. From this voice mechanic arises much Youtuber-friendly comedy, pebbled with dad humour. The magic words for levitation are “up dog”, for example. We are all profoundly weary of “up dog”, but it’s amusing to hear people squealing it repeatedly as they try to airlift to safety.

I think Lethal Company has too many imitators – REPO, Content Warning, Murky Divers, etcetera – but I am always delighted to explore another variation on the fizzy, memetic and uncanny Lethal Company aesthetic. In Yapyap, the whole world pulsates a bit when you’re stationary, as though your eyeballs were breathing. The architecture is luxuriant, with spiral stairs and star pattern ceilings, but also distorted and eaten away by noise. It’s grimly gratifying to see these cursed PS1-to-Roblox sensibilities applied to the wholesome realm of storybook fantasy.

There’s no time to gawp, mind: you’ve only got eight minutes per match to upend, break and defile as many sorcerous trinkets as possible. So off you gallop down the corridor, lobbing tempests into siderooms like a paperboy hurling Sunday editions through windows.

There are a bunch of manually designed rooms to discover, joined by spiral stairs, parapet walks and torchlit corridors. My favourite so far is the alchemy chamber, were you can flip through an enormous recipe book and hoik fungus and phoenix feathers into a bubbling cauldron.

There’s also a room built around a timed-release floor button that conjures a bunch of spectral orbs. I think if you smash them all before the button resets, you’ll get a prize. I almost managed it on my first attempt, but then a tufty avian gremlin cast a spell that transformed me into another tufty avian gremlin. Fortunately, it had worn off by the time I needed to teleport home. I tried again with the orb room on a different map, but a huge floating eyeball appeared and burned me to a skeleton.

These are among the better monsters in Yapyap. The zombie knights are more abundant, and pretty dull once you’ve conquered your fear of them. The most lethal is the ghost who chases you through surfaces if you fail to reach the teleportation chamber before your time is up. I haven’t met the giant spider from the trailer yet.

It’s possible the devs are skewing simpler with certain monsters because you have so many powers at your disposal. Wind wands aside, there are wands that gush urine, spells that cover the floor in fish, and potions that grant invisibility and the power of flight. A game that indulges such showmanship needs a few run-of-the-mill fallguys.

I’m enjoying the sense of being a freaky little vandal, kicking over Saruman’s Palantir while he’s out on manoeuvres. Player characters all sport ridiculous capes and run around with wands extended like Trick or Treatin’ kids. That said, it’s harder to form a party than it should be: the game lacks matchmaking, bizarrely, so you’ll have to raise your posse via Steam.

Beyond that, I would happily play a version of Yapyap – possibly even a mode within Yapyap – that features bigger environments and gives you much longer to explore them, with more emphasis on crafty puzzle-solving and ability combos. A game tilted more towards immersive sim players than streamers looking for their next opportunity to clown around on camera. Yapyap works well as a slapstick haunted house ride but I think it has the tools and the ambience to be a proper dungeon delve, if it took itself a little more seriously. Find the game on Steam.