| YAPYAP | |||
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| Release Date | Gameplay & Story | DLC & Pre-Order | Review |
YAPYAP is a co-op action horror game where you wreck a rival wizard’s tower using wacky spells and magical potions. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn’t do well, and if it’s worth your money.
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YAPYAP Review Overview
What is YAPYAP?
YAPYAP is an action-horror co-op experience meant to evoke the same proximity-based cooperative dungeon-crawling that games like Lethal Company, Content Warning, and REPO popularized. Players take the role of minions summoned by a magical overlord, sent to wreak havoc on a rival wizard’s tower by casting weird and wacky spells, all while avoiding the tower’s various guardians and creatures.
YAPYAP features:
⚫︎ Proximity voice chat
⚫︎ Voice-activated spellcasting
⚫︎ Co-op 3D Dungeon-crawling
⚫︎ Potion-making progression mechanics
⚫︎ 1 to 6-player Online Co-op
| Digital Storefronts | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Steam |
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| $9.99 | |||||
For more gameplay details, read everything we know about YAPYAP's gameplay and story.
YAPYAP Pros & Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
 Yet Another Unique Friendslop Experience Insane Hijinks Potential |
Low Map Variety Perpetual Gold Famine Forgettable After the First Two Hours |
YAPYAP Story - 5/10
To nobody’s surprise, YAPYAP’s storytelling is mostly environmental, consequently forcing it to be a background fixture more than anything else. All you have is a premise and a setting, but no real narrative, which is usually fine for games like these. Both premise and setting are just not that engaging, but it’s not offensive either.
YAPYAP Gameplay - 7/10
Although the mechanics themselves are fun, engaging, and unique in its niche, the game’s variety is downright abysmal. You’ll run out of new things to discover come the second hour of your first playthrough, and that’s assuming you make it there at all, considering the balancing this game has with its progression and economy.
YAPYAP Visuals - 7/10
To its credit, YAPYAP understood what vibes it wanted to set and did so very well. From the VHS-punk of the menu screen to the rustic simplicity of the era-appropriate world design, this game screams a specific decade. If only its animations could keep up, because apart from some okay monster attacks, this game animates like a puppet show during cutscenes.
YAPYAP Audio - 7/10
YAPYAP’s audio is somewhat redeemable in that sound is the defining factor of most playthroughs. From the harried spellcasting of your soon-to-be-deceased friends to the crunchy havoc your spells wreak, the game sounds great for what it’s trying to be. Sadly, without any visual or mechanical variety to go with it, the game’s audio variety suffers from poor selection, too.
YAPYAP Value for Money - 7/10
Although you’re very unlikely to rack up more than twenty hours of this game, you’re also only expected to pay ten bucks for it. That’s a great price, considering its multiplayer nature, so the whole squad can enjoy it for a little while before inevitably going back to Lethal Company.
YAPYAP Overall Score - 66/100
It’s hard to make magic monotonous, what with its fantastical nature and all, but YAPYAP managed to do exactly that. Though its premise is great and well executed, supplementary factors like map variety, economy balancing, and progression inefficiencies keep it from being the next big friendslop sensation.
YAPYAP Review: Magical Mishaps, Made Monotonous
Ever since Lethal Company made it big many years ago, friendslop games have been coming out of the woodwork to try and cash in on the same success. It’s been a mixed bag of hits and misses every few months, with some being no more than cashgrabs, and others being complete revolutions for the infant genre. As much as I want to categorize YAPYAP in the latter, it leans more towards the former, despite its best efforts.
It’s a game steeped in good ideas and has good enough execution to boot, but it was kneecapped on arrival by a disappointing lack of variety in an otherwise fantastical world. Let’s warp right in, shall we?
It’s a Quiet Night, and You are a Mischievous Minion
So, what can something like YAPYAP possibly be about? Well, the title’s not indicative of anything, at least not at the beginning, but it’s best described as an antithesis to Semiwork’s breakout 2025 game, R.E.P.O. They’re quite the direct opposites, as while R.E.P.O has you making sure everything you touch doesn’t jostle around too much lest it lose its value, YAPYAP has you raiding someone else’s place in the dead of night to break, burn, and piss on everything.
That’s not me being crass either; that’s the technical term the game has for the act of urinating, down to the quest boards asking you to piss in a certain number of cups. But that’s getting ahead of things. Your only goal is to tear the place apart and teleport back home, all within 10 minutes.
Of course, doing so unopposed is no fun, not to mention completely unrealistic considering how gung-ho wizards are about making familiars. No, you’re remodeling the place in the dead of night with a tower’s worth of animated armor, grotesque summons, and weird creatures stalking you.
Some are straightforward and pitifully easy to kite around and avoid, like the armors, while others are complete enigmas that even a few hours of gameplay won’t explain. This takes place over three days, racking up Chaos as you go with each major piece of furniture or fixture destroyed.
Assumedly, the story behind this mischievous raid is centered around your master, a powerful magic user of some sort who summoned you and your friends as disposable minions. You are ordered to destroy as much of the place as possible (manifested mechanically as Chaos points) and reach a certain threshold within a specific number of days.
Now, this story is mostly unclear and pieced together from promos and Steam descriptions, but that’s only because the game itself doesn’t say much about its story, relying on environmental cues to push the narrative forward. It’s one of the game’s many pitfalls, but we should get to another major mechanic first before getting to those.
Verbal Spells Spell Chaos for Your Group
Now, if YAPYAP had you destroying a wizard tower using your hands alone, it would’ve been great fun already, but it ups the ante by allowing you to cast spells. Point and click casting would’ve sufficed, but where’s the fun in that? No, casting spells in this game requires you to scream the magic words into your mic.
Wanna get up to a ledge? Just yell "Updog" while you have the Wand of Winds equipped, and there’s a personal updraft lifting you up into the sky shortly after. Is a friend or enemy getting too close for comfort? Why not send them careening with a casting of "Aero" and see just how far you can yeet someone?
These are just a couple of examples, but there’s a spell for every occasion if you’re good at gathering enough coins to get the right wands. Wands are substitute for spellbooks in this game in that spells aren’t memorized. You can’t cast a spell using a wand that doesn’t have that spell in its list. Fire spells for the fire wand, wind spells for the wind wand, and streams of piss and fish transmogrification for the weird fleshy wand. Standard stuff, really.
You’ve got to switch between wands to access the spells you need, and wands don’t come cheap. As fun as the vocal spellcasting is, this is where the game’s pitfalls start to take shape, because with this system of wand-locked spells comes the very real economic problem YAPYAP has in its shop and item system.
Wizarding Isn’t Cheap, and Minions Don’t Get Paid Enough for It
Apart from the Wand of Winds you get at the start of each run, which is little more than an actual, literal twig, by the way, all wands must either be bought from the Item Shop or found while out and about. This locks you to simple push and mobility spells until you complete your first quota. While this sounds fair on paper, it slowly crumbles apart once you reach your second quota onwards, or when one of your friends dies while having these wands on them.
Simply put, this game has an economy problem. Gold is what you use to buy wands, and boy, does the game not give you enough opportunities to earn it. Each quota pays out with a small sum of gold, often not enough for one wand, let alone one for each of you, and gold itself is a rare loot to find while out on a run.
This creates a vicious cycle of being too poor to get very far, leading to you being poor. You’re lucky to find more than ten gold every night you go out, and that’s being generous. With wands priced at 25 gold or higher, it’s almost impossible to get something better than the starting wand before your second quota.
This would be more bearable if wands were all you should be buying, but the game also comes with potion ingredients and miscellaneous, non-magical tools for your utility. This leads to most runs never being prosperous enough for players to buy both wands and tools, only ever one or the other.
What about those potion ingredients, though? Surely something worthwhile can be made from those? Well, yes and no.
Brewing Your Own Level-Ups
YAPYAP’s progression system is rather unique in that it’s completely up to you how you want to go about it. Since you don’t get paid per night like in REPO, instead only getting to sell what little you don’t destroy and fully paid only when the quota’s finished, your only avenue of progression between quotas is through potions.
Potions are stat buffs and temporary status effects that you can make yourself by brewing them in the starting area’s basement. These can improve your health and stamina when imbibed, but can also make you invisible, fly, or sound like a nerd, to name a few other effects. You can find potion ingredients while out on a raid and send them home immediately for brewing if you so wish, so it’s largely painless to gather the materials. The problem is the potency of the potions, though, not their brewing.
Potions increase stamina and health by tens at a time. When your max starts at a hundred, this is a marginal improvement at best. Considering it takes four ingredients per mixture, and around 5 ingredients are found on average per night, it really doesn’t seem worth the hassle. Potion recipes are also very specific, so those five ingredients you found might not even be the right ones.
The temporary buffs are too situational and run out much too quickly to be of any use, and to make matters worse, their effects are outclassed by wands entirely. If you get lucky, you can tough out most dangers, but if progression is completely luck-based, then there’s no room for skill to shine in this game.
Also, let’s not forget that potion brewing isn’t available at all until your second quota, so if you were hoping for an easy first run, the best this game can offer is destitution and random loot drops. Amazingly, that’s not the least remarkable thing about YAPYAP. No, that honor goes to its level design.
Losing Momentum from Level Fatigue
REPO hit early access with three unique levels to play through. Lethal company had eight moons to explore at that point as well. Content Warning only ever had one level, but it’s procedurally generated and extends infinitely downward with every excursion. Do you want to know how many locations YAPYAP has? I genuinely don’t know.
Really, I can’t tell. If there are different maps, I’m skeptical because they all look the same despite a different name popping up every night. If it’s the same map, just procedurally generated every night, I’m also skeptical because I can navigate and expect which rooms will come next just from past nights.
This is another of YAPYAP’s problems, and it’s mostly applicable to its maps, but the wands and enemies also fall under this category. For almost all major aspects of its gameplay—wands, maps, enemies, potion ingredients, and unlockable areas—YAPYAP only has a handful of choices available at any given time, and they cycle endlessly across however many nights you can survive.
This is excusable for an early access title, but this is a fully released game. Now, I’m not saying post-release updates are impossible, but given how little this game has on release compared to what its kin had while in EA, I’m not holding my breath for its continued development.
Together with its economy problem, it really does seem like YAPYAP simply does not have what it takes to go the distance, possible major overhauls notwithstanding.
Dispelled the Magic Before Long
YAPYAP is a conflicting mess of good and bad. On one hand, it’s incredibly fun with its vocal spellcasting and extreme makeover house edition gameplay. On the other hand, all that whimsy won’t make it past more than a couple of hours once the players realize what’s wrong with the game.
Progression is slow, unrewarding, and sometimes outright hostile to the player. If all you can do is hope for the best, then your cooperation with your friends is never rewarded, eroding one of the game’s core pillars of co-op. It’s sad, really, that of all the things YAPYAP could’ve accomplished with its fun formula, it only managed to make magical mishaps monotonous.
Is YAPYAP Worth It?
Cheap Enough to Try, But Don’t Invite the Whole Squad
Despite my disappointment, I can still recommend YAPYAP to some people, and that’s mostly because of how cheap it is. The game comes in at a respectable $9.99, and that’s not even accounting for the sales Steam likes to do for games like these. That’s basically the limit of how much I’d consider acceptable for it. A penny more, and I’d reconsider.
That said, I still won’t call the whole squad to play this, however cheap it may be. Maybe find one or two friends, try it, and see if you can enjoy it past the first couple of hours. If the experience sits fine by you, or if you’re okay hoping for future changes, then call the rest of the squad in to cast spells at each other until someone turns into a fish. I wouldn’t hold my breath, though.
| Digital Storefronts | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Steam |
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| $9.99 | |||||
YAPYAP FAQ
How Do I Unlock Potion Brewing in YAPYAP?
Players can unlock the basement and access the potion cauldron by finishing their first quota and receiving the Basement Key.
How Do I Brew Potions in YAPYAP?
Players can brew potions using the cauldron at the starting area’s basement, accessible through the basement door or through the portal outside of the cottage. Players can brew potions by dropping appropriate ingredients into the cauldron and pressing E to start brewing.
After that, players need to take an empty bottle to the cauldron and press E again to fill it with their newly-brewed potion.
Do You Need to Be Friends to Invite Players in YAPYAP?
Yes. At the moment, YAPYAP does not have random matchmaking, and you can only invite players from your Steam friends list.
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YAPYAP Product Information
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| Title | YAPYAP |
|---|---|
| Release Date | February 3, 2026 |
| Developer | Maison Bap |
| Publisher | Maison Bap |
| Supported Platforms | Steam |
| Genre | Action, Adventure, Horror |
| Number of Players | 1-6 |
| ESRB Rating | RP |
| Official Website | YAPYAP Official Website |
