Let’s get this out of the way: If it wasn’t already painfully obvious from the trailers thus far, Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is not the next ultra-ambitious first-party Nintendo game meant to capture any and all demographics, from grade-schoolers to grandmas in the way, say, Donkey Kong Bananza is. It is the most E-rated of Nintendo’s most recent slate of E-rated games. Putting it charitably, it is a game for families with young kids. But who says the littlest gamers among us don’t deserve something cute and low-stakes to have a fun time with?
Here’s the setup: A big leathery book called Mr. Encyclopedia — Mr. E, for short — falls out of the sky and lands among a curious pack of Yoshis. Being that a book cannot read itself, he kindly asks the Yoshis to analyze his pages that contain a multitude of fairy-tale habitats full of strange creatures with unique traits. From what I saw, that’s your sole objective: Have a Yoshi magnify in on a being wiggling at you in the book, and hop inside the pages of the book to figure out what it does. Collect trinkets along the way to unlock hints about less obvious traits of guys you’ve already found but haven’t 100%-ed. Get yourself into a boss battle every once in a while. Rinse and repeat.
Almost immediately into my hour and a half of playing through the first and fourth chapters of Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, I knew that this game was not intended for me, and that’s OK! Even then, I could still appreciate what it was aiming to accomplish in encouraging its players to think creatively to discover new characteristics. The environments are governed by rules, and it’s up to the player to use what the level gives you to figure out what those rules are and how all of the things within it interact with each other. They’re simple logic puzzles, testing out all of Yoshi’s skills and seeing what happens.
Yoshi’s main move set is essentially the same as most other Yoshi experiences — eat something to hatch a trail of throwable eggs, jump and float, ground pound — with the addition of the ability to willfully scoop up little guys or objects on his back to carry around and throw them wherever appropriate. It could be tossing a tiny thief mouse into a crevice to grab something you wouldn’t have been able to get otherwise, or carrying an apple or another food item to feed to one of the creatures to see how it affects its abilities or demeanor.
The nice thing is that it’s so forgiving; you can’t really fail. If you accidentally eat something you weren’t supposed to eat, it’ll just respawn, though it may put a small dent in your progress. Whatever Yoshi you choose in the rainbow of seven Yoshis — merely an aesthetic preference — it won’t lose health, even if, for example, he’s getting pelted by seeds from a flying watermelon-type monster. And if you mess up one of the platforming challenges, you simply just start again until you get it right. It really is one of the safest level builds for a game that requires only a modicum of skill to minimize frustration and squash the potential for rage quitting. It’s supposed to be cute and fun!
Part of the fun is getting to choose names for each and every creature added to Mr. E’s pages, though he’ll also have his own suggestions that you can accept outright. I personally named the aforementioned tiny mouse “annoying” because it kept trying to steal the things my Yoshi was carrying. Though this is undoubtedly part of Yoshi and the Mysterious Book being a creative outlet, this is also where I’m a little tripped up — there’s too much reading required to be a fully unchaperoned playthrough for some of the core age group I’m envisioning to be the target audience. (Plus, I don’t think someone under age 10 knows what the word “belligerent” means, as Mr. E fairly describes an irksome bunch of arrow-like bees.) For small kids just getting a handle on phonics (if they’re even learning that these days) but saw Yoshi in the Super Mario Galaxy movie and were like “I love THAT guy the most!” and wanted to play this game, they’ll definitely need someone over their shoulder to help out.
Overall, Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is quite adorable. The scratchy fantasy book illustrations are very charming, all the little guys are super cute, and I am a fan of the choice to keep Yoshi half-pixelated in an homage to all the Yoshi games that came before this one. The whole thing might not be truly E for everyone if you were hoping for, say, a successor to Yoshi’s Island for Switch 2. But Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is a gentle platformer that seems almost certain to provide an easy on-ramp to the Nintendo ecosystem for the next generation of Yoshi fans.
Leanne Butkovic (she/they) is an Editorial Project Manager at IGN, where they’ve also written about movies, TV, and games.
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