The Yoshi series has had an interesting trajectory in the wake of the world conquering classic, Yoshi’s Island. It got multiple follow ups, across the N64, DS, and 3DS, but all of them variously failed to match the heights of the Super Nintendo original. Wooly World on the Wii U, however, was an excellent game, the best the series had been in decades, and portended a better future for the series. Those hopes, however, ended up being dashed when the crafts inspired Yoshi’s Crafted World on the Switch released in 2019, and… wasn’t particularly good.
Which brings us to Yoshi and the Mysterious Book. Mysterious Book has a clear vision that it executes on nearly flawlessly, a vision that also informs and justifies the design choices that the game makes.
“Mysterious Book is one of the increasing number of Nintendo games that is built in Unreal Engine, in this case Unreal Engine 5.”
There are two specific qualities that have persisted through every Yoshi game to date – they are exceptionally easy, almost aimed at beginners and younger players; and they are almost always absolutely gorgeous, imbibing gorgeous art and aesthetics that emphasize stylized animation and expressiveness more than photorealism. Both of those hold true for Mysterious Book as well.
Let’s talk about that latter point first, because it is, expectedly, the thing that stands out first. Eschewing the crafts and arts inspired look of the last couple of Yoshi games, Mysterious Book instead returns to the storybook inspired fairy tale aesthetic that Yoshi’s Story sort of hinted at. I say hinted at, because Mysterious Book is a more full fledged realization of that style than anyone may have expected, to a startling degree.
Multiple animations and transitions in the game have flourishes inspired by that conceit, from text and prompts showing up as doodles on the book’s page, to levels slowly being drawn in when you enter them the first time, and much more. Animations in particular stand out, with their distinct stop motion style drawing attention to them right away and emphasizing and highlighting them that much more.
Mysterious Book is one of the increasing number of Nintendo games that is built in Unreal Engine, in this case Unreal Engine 5. Normally, this can mean a poorly optimized and performing game, particularly on hardware with lower power and resources such as the Nintendo Switch 2 is. It is astonishing, then, and presumably a testament to Nintendo and developer Good Feel’s mastery of the engine and the hardware, that none of that holds true here.
There’s no stutter, there’s no overhead, and the image quality is great – at the very least in docked mode, where, no matter how big the TV screen I played it on, Mysterious Book looked gorgeous. In handheld mode, I did find the image slightly softer, relatively speaking – it still remained a good looking game, but the image quality in handheld mode was closer to what I had expected the game to have throughout. It’s a win that the docked mode looks as good as it does, although it’s a shame that doesn’t extend to handheld play too.
As I mentioned earlier, Yoshi games are remarkably easy, to the point that one might consider them suitable for being the very first games someone plays. In the past, this lacking difficulty level hasn’t necessarily been justified by the game’s larger design goals. To be clear, nothing in said goals necessarily contradicted the easy difficulty (it wasn’t a case of the game looking or feeling like it should be difficult, but then being a walk in the park, like, for example, Twilight Princess was famously back in its day).
“Each level is based around one creature (flora or fauna), that, as you play said level, you learn more about.”
The games, nonetheless, remained extremely easy side scrolling platformers, lacking challenge to the point that it was reasonable to ask what the appeal was for anyone who didn’t fall in the “very young” or “starting out” buckets. Indeed, this has been a common refrain with several past Yoshi games, certainly the DS and 3DS ones – if it’s just an extremely easy to play 2D platformer, in Nintendo’s catalog, then why play Yoshi?
Mysterious Book, as I mentioned, answers that question, and it answers it delightfully well. The game remains a 2D platformer, as before, but it completely gives up combat, hazards, and fail states. Instead, it’s a puzzle platformer, where the point of each level is traversing the environment by leveraging interactions and combinations.
Each level is based around one creature (flora or fauna), that, as you play said level, you learn more about. You might learn that jumping on it lets you gain more height. Or you might learn that it will absorb water, clearing paths for you. You might learn it can make flowers and plants bloom, or you might learn it plays a musical note when struck. Every level is based around one of these creatures, and each of these creatures has a seemingly endless and dizzying array of interactions, with Yoshi, with others similar creatures, with its prey or predators, with its environment, and more. After a while, the game almost becomes a toy box, where the challenge, more than anything the game poses to you, is trying to figure out if a certain interaction you have in mind can actually be made to play out in Mysterious Book.
In this way, Yoshi and the Mysterious Book exemplifies the toy box design philosophy that Nintendo has imbibed in particular since the dawn of the Switch era with Breath of the Wild. Practically everything in the game interacts with everything else in the game, often in seemingly unexpected and delightful ways. Those interactions can stack and cascade, and they almost never fail to elicit a smile.
“Where something damages you, you get returned instantly to the last safe spot with no penalty or loss whatsoever.”
The remarkable thing here is that this premise lends itself remarkably well to the low difficulty conceit of the Yoshi series. You are merely observing these creatures inside the book’s pages and discovering and recording their interactions. There’s no possible scope for you to die – enemies can’t kill you, fall damage can’t kill you, bottomless pits even can’t kill you.
Where something damages you, you get returned instantly to the last safe spot with no penalty or loss whatsoever. There’s also no time limit, nor any other pressure on you, the player. Instead, you can take your own time, however long or short that is, in figuring out all the ins and outs of the level you are in.
This makes this game remarkably well suited to those aforementioned younger audiences. The 2D plane view means it’s extremely easy to control, with no camera control or 3D movement to contend with. The lack of time limits, enemies, hazards, combat, or even a lives system means you have as much slack as you need when going through the levels – and if you need even more than the game offers, you can press the L button at any time to pull up a hint about what you should be doing, or at least looking at, to open the path forward.
Kids don’t have to worry about coordinating or reflexes, they don’t need to worry about “winning” or even “progressing”. Realistically, they can spend as much time as they want in a single level, exhausting all its bevy of interactions and permutations to their heart’s content, and move on when they are done.
“Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is a lovely, very unique, very delightful platformer, and I sincerely hope it represents the future direction for the series.”
But where this lack of difficulty presented a problem in the more straightforward 2D platformer format that past Yoshi games adopted, here it hardly matters, because the point, or the challenge, of this game is more in discovering various interactions, and using them to get (or get to) what you want. It’s impressive that a game this easy feels this engaging and compelling, by simply reframing its conceit away from challenge and progress to play and exploration.
Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is not necessarily a killer app, or the next great Nintendo game, for those who’ve been waiting on that. It is, however, a game of the type that only Nintendo makes anymore, certainly with this level of budget and polish. I expected to appreciate Mysterious Book’s merits from a distance, understanding that the game was well suited to its intended audience, but finding little for myself within it.
Instead, I found myself delighted by its whimsical depth, and its never ending trove of surprises. I would love to see a potential future Yoshi game iterate on this formula, and improve upon it even further.
This game was reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2.
