Cut their string before they cut yours.

Kite fighting is a real sport, played across South Asia, East Asia and the Middle East, and the rule is the same everywhere. You do not shoot anybody down. You bring your line across their line, and you cut.

Yakko Tako Royale plays by that rule, then fills the sky. Every kite hangs from a string that runs a long way straight down, and that string is the only thing anybody can take from you. Fly above a rival and their string is right there in front of you. So is yours, to them. Now put sixteen of those in one arena.

Sixteen kites, one sky

Online play runs through Steam. Host a lobby and your friends drop straight in, or browse the open lobbies and join a stranger's storm. Up to 16 players fight in the same sky at once, and it is exactly the kind of gorgeous chaos that number promises: strings everywhere, cuts landing in threes, the crowd thinning until two kites circle each other over the water. One button rematches the whole lobby.

Or fight on the couch

Two to four players, one screen, one machine. Everybody picks a stall at the night market, picks a kite and presses START. No accounts, no waiting, because everybody is already sitting in the room. Empty seats take bots, at four skill levels you can mix in the same match.

Easy to fly, wicked to master

• Hold to fly. Release and your kite glides down. The floor bounces you back up.

• Steer with the shoulders, or tilt the pad if gyro is on. Your kite goes where the nose points.

• Lunge to cut. Flying through a string does nothing on its own. The lunge is a short committed dart with a cooldown, and it is the only thing that cuts.

• Two passes cut a string. Damage stays until somebody clears it, so a rival you caught once is a rival one pass from falling.

From Edo to the patang

The roster runs from the yakkodako of Edo Japan to the fighter kites of the Indian subcontinent. Patang, chand, addha and dabba fly alongside oni, kitsune, tanuki, hannya, kappa and a long line of yokai.

Four arenas, six formats

• Batsu: An island on an open sea. Room to run, nowhere to hide.

• Shinkai: the deep sea. Schools of fish cross the board and the anchor splits the arena.

• Back to Edo: the great wave, in woodblock with Fuji behind. The busiest sky of the four.

• Yume: the dream, which puts on a different look every single time you enter.

Play a timed round where the most cuts wins, a first to 3, 7 or 12, a battle royale where a cut is final, or last survivor. Set the speed and the whole board changes character. With sixteen in the sky, last survivor is a tournament and a comedy at the same time.

The seven lucky gods, armed

Daruma drift across the board and open on contact. Fukurokuju makes one pass enough. Jurojin makes rivals need four. Benzaiten makes you uncuttable and wipes the passes banked against you. Bishamonten makes you invulnerable and armed, so two rams take a rival out with no string work at all. Hotei clears your own damage. Ebisu casts your lunge far past its normal reach, and Daikokuten hands you the mallet, so you can lunge again almost at once. In a sixteen-kite sky, a god in the right hands turns the whole match.

Learn it in one sitting

A hands-on tutorial runs inside a real arena with real physics, not a slideshow. The game checks you did each thing before moving on, and button prompts show the pad actually in your hands.

Built for the Steam Deck

Developed and tested on the Deck, with gyro steering and its own Steam Input configuration. Runs on Linux and Windows. On the couch, the Deck's own controls count as one of the four players, so a Deck plus one pad is already a two-player match.

Steam achievements climb from your first match to Royale with Cheese, and every takedown you land online counts on the global Takedowns leaderboard.