Friendship comes in all forms, even covered in piss
Maison Bap’s YAPYAP falls in that genre affectionately known as “friendslop”. You likely know what it is — friends get together in groups online and coordinate together through voice and gestures to achieve a common goal. In YAPYAP that goal is to get to the top of a tower by using spells, exploring and defeating enemies. The, um, magic of YAPYAP is that it really leans into the vocal side and often leads into some pretty fantastic and hilarious results.
Our time with the game, serving as our soft-launch to our new Friendshop feature, had us yelling PISSYUCk and UPDOG and UPDOG DOG DOG DOG DOG into our microphones all while trying to maintain communication with our teammates.
It’s not a complex game; we’re just walking around in first person and waving a wand to cast spells, utilizing proximity-based audio as we come close to or move away from our friends. At the beginning of a run we’re given a points quota, which we need to break things or defeat enemies to achieve. All too often we’ll be coming to the end of our timer and realizing that we we need to head into a cubby or back down into a basement to find more crap to knock over, but it’s not a chore. The traversal isn’t complex, there are enough warp points to let us get from one end of the map to the other, and we can even find some goofy ass ways to make it to new areas. In one of our runs Dali got picked up by a gargoyle (they can be lethal, dropping us anywhere they want) but instead of death he was dropping in the middle of the gargoyle’s platform, allowing him to run past and into the top of the main tower faster than if he had looked for a path in.
Mistakes are welcomed here, even when we die, and we can die quick and often. If we’re lucky we can revive our teammates, but if not then they’re just floating around watching us and talking on a separate channel that we can’t hear.
Within minutes the game becomes easy to understand and control, and fun to mess around in. For an aesthetic that’s purposefully aping 90s PC adventure the game is surprisingly accessible.
YAPYAP is just stupid fun, as a lot of these games are, but the speed at which we’re able to really jump into and understand (and break) the game is terrific and a testament to its design.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. Images and video courtesy publisher. This video first appeared on The SideQuest for February 13, 2026.
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