The Yoshi series has cemented itself as one of the most approachable in Nintendo’s arsenal, providing experiences that younger gamers in particular can enjoy without too much friction. Woolly World and Crafted World offer light-hearted platforming fun while still retaining some of the spirit of the SNES original, and both come recommended. Developer Good-Feel’s latest effort, Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, unfortunately, has a few too many stabilisers on its wheels, losing a lot of what made the series great to begin with.
The game takes place primarily in, well, a book, utilising a unique art style to depict its setting, much like its Woolly and Crafted predecessors. You’re tasked with entering the pages of the talking encyclopaedia Mr. E in order to seek out creatures within and discover their mysteries. Naturally, Bowser Jr. and Kamek are back to cause some mischief, though their overall presence is surprisingly muted.
The art style, while certainly pleasant, doesn’t quite hit as hard as earlier titles. Character animation purposefully skips frames to give it a stop-motion look, which is a nice touch. Stylised text can also occasionally be seen in the background and foreground while colours fade as you approach the edge of the levels – both of which are clear indications that, yes, you’re in a book.
Aside from this, though, I really wasn’t blown away by the visuals given the jump over to the Switch 2. In handheld mode, the ink-like edges applied to characters and environments look disappointingly soft and almost pixelated in motion. I can’t be 100% certain as to what resolution the game targets, but I’d be surprised if it’s hitting the full 1080p display.
Docked is much better, thankfully, but even then, backgrounds lack detail and vibrancy, while individual stages fail to introduce much visual variety. Yes, you have different biomes, but you’ll often see some of the same assets throughout.
The music is lovely, mind you, with plenty of charming, easygoing tunes that perfectly match the environments. Additional sound design is equally impressive, with Yoshi emitting delightfully cheerful “mlems” and the majority of the other creatures making their own unique sounds.
Starting off, you’ll have access to the opening Wildwoods world in which you select the creature you wish to investigate via a sort of overworld page within Mr. E. The aim of the game is to mess around with the critters until you make discoveries, thus granting you stars to unlock subsequent worlds.
Small discoveries are worth one star, and big ones, three. It could be something as simple as gobbling up a creature to see what it tastes like, or actually carrying it on your back to utilise its unique properties.
For example, you’ll come across the bubble-blowing Glubbit creature in Wildwoods, and this thing lets you access high places by producing a bunch of bubbles in which to float. Similarly, the Bafloonder, found in the Seaside world, lets you travel quickly underwater by shooting out air stored in its body. By using their abilities in different ways, you’ll gradually unlock new discoveries to fill out their encyclopaedia entries.
Each discovery is indicated by a cute on-screen animation with a short block of text describing the action, while anything left undiscovered will be hinted at in Mr. E’s pages. Oh, and if you’re feeling particularly creative, you can name the creatures yourself, so if ‘Glubbit’ doesn’t sound appealing, then maybe try ‘Bubs McBubblson’… or y’know, something actually good.
In keeping with the approachable nature of Yoshi games, most of the potential discoveries found within Mr. E’s pages will occur naturally through normal play; it’s quite rare that you’ll end one of the stages with many left over, and so it wasn’t long – three or four hours – until I’d accumulated enough stars to unlock all of the main worlds. Couple this with the mandatory invincibility and automatic recovery from falls, and you’ve got what might be one of the easiest games ever published by Nintendo.
It’s not completely without challenge, mind you. Like previous entries, all of the stages also contain collectible flowers, and some of these can be a little tricky to locate. Gathering them up isn’t mandatory, but doing so will unlock Exploration Tools during the latter portion of the game, adding custom UI elements to the screen that you can move around or swap out however you like.
Some of these are genuinely useful, like a flower radar to help mop up collectible stragglers, but others feel completely superfluous. Why on earth do I need a graph showcasing the real-time height of Yoshi’s jumps?
Ultimately, while there are dozens of neat little gameplay ideas from the multitude of creatures you discover, they’re all mostly segregated to the specific stages in which they’re found. As such, there’s little sense of progression or evolution as you make your way through to the later levels. It’s all just the same thing, again and again, punctuated by constant ramblings from Mr. E.
Similarly, the levels themselves feel more like miniature sandbox stages rather than handcrafted experiences designed to get you from A to B. As such, many of them feel surprisingly empty and drab, and so going from the beautifully dense, busy stages of Woolly World to this feels like an undeniable step down.
Though I’m certain Mysterious Book is squarely aimed at children, I struggle to really nail down an exact target audience. On the one hand, musical cues for ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ and ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb’ suggest that this is for pre-schoolers, but then, thanks to Mr. E’s chattering, there’s actually quite a lot of text to read, including the optional custom names for your creatures. This perhaps suggests that older children of a more advanced reading age would gain more from it.
Indeed, it’s practically screaming for some sort of two-player co-op mode to bring these ideas together and help younger players ease into things with the help of an adult. That it’s completely lacking such an option feels quite out of sorts for Nintendo. As it is, when I tried to introduce my own four-year-old daughter to Mysterious Book, she provided her own damning verdict after less than an hour: “Can we play Mario Kart World now, Daddy?”
One thing’s for sure. Although Nintendo’s studios are often adept at making games that children and adults can enjoy equally, I really can’t say that’s the case here. That’s not to say that you absolutely shouldn’t touch this if you’re a grown-up, but perhaps consider that it won’t offer the challenge or ingenuity of your average Nintendo platformer – it’s not one I’ll be going back to anytime soon.
Conclusion
Yoshi and the Mysterious Book isn’t a bad game. There’s a lot of fun to be had in discovering the many creatures hidden within Mr. E’s pages, though it also suffers from a repetitive structure that doesn’t evolve or provide any sense of meaningful challenge. Visually, it also lacks the punch that Woolly World and Crafted World offered, and it frankly looks pretty bad in handheld mode.
If you’ve got young children who are eager to see more from Yoshi after catching him in the Mario Galaxy Movie, then this will provide a few hours’ worth of fun while getting them used to basic platforming tropes. Otherwise, I’d probably recommend a Switch Online subscription to check out Yoshi’s Island for the SNES.
