It’s always a drag when a game you are looking forward disappoints, but it’s even sadder when it shows you exactly how it didn’t have to at the same time. Plenty of games miss the mark in some way, but the ones that prove they have promise – that show you a spark, but not any kindling – are the real letdowns. Yoshi and the Mysterious Book’s spark ignites a little over halfway through, and it burned so hot I literally shouted with joy… only to watch that ember fade away without a twig in sight shortly after. Its creative creature designs are truly impressive, and the open-ended levels they live in can be a real delight to explore the first time through. But its best ideas often go unnurtured, which makes this tome feel less like a fantasy novel and more like a biology textbook: a collection of amusing experiments paired with a pile of homework.
Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is a puzzle-platformer that puts its emphasis squarely on the puzzle part. Each level is based around some novel little (or sometimes quite big) creature that Yoshi must lick, lift, or lob to learn all he can about it. These bits of information are logged as Discoveries, and they range from how a flower person’s petals turn orange when it eats an apple to how a murderous scythe monster can’t see you when hiding in tall grass. Discoveries can also be made about the level itself, rewarding you for breaking tough objects, finding hidden Smiley Flowers, or just reaching an end goal – although even that won’t “end” the level if you want to keep exploring. I really liked never quite knowing what I was in for when I hopped into a new stage.
The breadth and variety here is definitely something to celebrate, too. There are dozens of unique creatures, nearly all of which are charming to look at and carry some decently interesting mechanical gimmick for their level to be built around (as well future levels where they might also show up). There’s a green critter with the head of a bubble wand, a jellyfish that acts as one of those rich-person water jetpacks, bubblegum guys that multiply excessively when hopped on, a giant drill-nosed warthog you can ride, a bouncy hula-hooping bird, and so many more – all of which you have free reign to name yourself, which is a degree of control I should not be trusted with.
The levels you initially meet each one in are designed to both teach you about that creature and then take advantage of it to complete some goal, only a small handful of which are the typical “go to the right” structure you might expect from previous Yoshi games. An early level about bees has you recovering stolen flowers, while one about a fisherman wants you to reel in the biggest fish in the pond. All the while you’ll be peppered with a near constant stream of Discoveries just for trying to figure out where to go or how this particular critter behaves, flooding your brain with dopamine and your screen with stamps that mark your achievements.
This constant creativity is a big reason why Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is so pleasant to play, but not all of these levels are created equal. Figuring out how to best travel by seabird was a fun challenge, but aimlessly running around a Shy Guy village to make them all play music at the same time was far less inspired. Levels that rely on some disappointingly wonky physics interactions were a particular low spot across the board, with things like ricocheting a spinning top, surfing over waves and a wobbling pirate ship, or wall jumping on a springy bug being truly frustrating at times – and in a way Nintendo platformers don’t typically blunder into.
The other big issue is that these levels are all about the Discoveries so, once most of them have been made, the actual levels lose a lot of their appeal. There’s very little that’s intrinsically fun or interesting about completing these stages after the map is already covered with your past accomplishments, which makes revisiting them to find Discoveries you missed (which is the entire pitch of what Yoshi and the Mysterious Book wants you to do) a lot less amusing. This is basically a stack of themed sheets of bubble wrap: bubble wrap is fun to pop! But unless you’re really serious about bursting every single one, no matter how mundane they may be, you’re mostly just left playing with a limp piece of plastic after that first pass.
This wouldn’t be such a big problem if later levels asked you to put the Discoveries you made into practice in more interesting or creative ways, but therein lies Yoshi and the Mysterious Book’s greatest letdown. Many creatures will reappear in later pages, asking you to use or interact with them to make Discoveries about the newest research subject, but these interactions are typically pretty straightforward. The maps themselves are so small that there isn’t much room for the newest creature to share the spotlight while you are learning about it. About half the levels have a variant version that does put the focus on a specific creature interaction that wasn’t in the main course, and these are some of the more interesting tasks you can find, but they are also exceptionally brief more often than not.
The major exception to this depth issue is the last level of Chapter 6, which is so good that it quite literally should have been what the entire game was built around, but sadly that’s far from the case. I’ll give you a mechanical spoiler warning now if you really want to see it for yourself, but I have to avoid certain details anyway due to Nintendo’s restrictions on what we can dicuss before release.
In this stage, Yoshi can essentially summon any creature you’ve met before (one at a time), and it completely recontextualizes everything you’ve done up until that point in a way that made me genuinely jump out of my seat. Suddenly all that “research” you did was actually training, and it’s up to you to figure out how to scale that waterfall, dig through that mountain, or fight that enemy. For a game all about experimentation and discovery, it’s one of the very few times you are given the power to actually get creative and truly apply what you’ve learned to solve problems.
This level rules. The moment it was thought up, the dev team should have centered everything else around it. I wish every chapter ended with a stage like this that applies your knowledge of the creatures you met just before it, and I was at least expecting its arrival roughly eight hours in to signal an “Act 2” of sorts that put this mechanic front and center. Instead, Yoshi and the Mysterious Book pretty much pretends like it never happened and mostly goes back to business as usual as it introduces more and more creatures it will never make full use of.
It’s such a bummer, man. Nearly every level was amusing to some degree on my first run through it, but I started to get tired of how shallow the creature exploration felt as early as Chapter 3. I held out hope that I simply hadn’t gotten to some turning point yet, but that’s truly what this game wants to be: a series of cute gimmicks, each with a big checklist of boxes to methodically tick off for little reason other than the love of hearing that “pop.” To be shown what this enticing concept could have been used for instead, and then have the rug pulled out from under me right after, left a sour taste in my mouth that none of the chapters and challenges that followed ever managed to make up for. You’re rarely asked to build in this sandbox, just to dig for the marbles buried beneath it.
To its credit, there are a ton of Discoveries to find, and some of them are genuinely well hidden or tricky to sniff out, so I imagine this game will appeal to the type of completionist that does just love the pop. There’s a built-in hint system that lets you spend a plentiful currency called Tokens to see which ones you are missing and how to find them, too, so it never leaves you flailing in the dark wondering what hyper-specific interaction you haven’t tried yet. The tools are there to make Discovery hunting a relatively painless process – it’s just never a particularly rewarding one.
The collectible I was more inclined to track down all of were the Smiley Flowers, and there are generally somewhere in the range of three to six per level. These are hidden in very classic Yoshi platformer ways, usually asking you to reach certain spots or uncover hidden areas where they are tucked away. Yoshi and the Mysterious Book has plenty of similarities to previous Yoshi games in stuff like its egg throwing and flutter jumping, but it doesn’t actually share a whole lot of DNA in a practical sense. That’s totally fine, and I dig when a developer experiments with a series in interesting ways, but something about hunting for flowers was satisfying in a way that asking variations of, “Have I tried dunking this nerd under water yet?” simply was not.
Collecting those flowers was fun enough on its own, but the reward you get for doing so has got to be one of the most perplexing unlockables I have ever seen in any video game. Not available until after Chapter 6 – which, again, took me about eight hours to finish, and I only spent another five or six after that to finish every available level – five Smiley Flowers can be exchanged for… a new UI element. These nonsensical options to customize the information your screen displays while in a level range from a chat log for your bookish companion, Mr. E, to graphs that tells you the flavor profile of anything you lick. There are multiple ways to measure speed, water quality, temperature, and a whole host of other variables that no level ever asks you to care about in any way.
Nothing about this system is offensive or distracting, but very little about it is helpful either. Apart from a clock that I imagine speedrunners will appreciate, pretty much the only useful one I’ve unlocked so far is a radar that points toward nearby Smiley Flowers. Even stuff like displaying Yoshi’s remaining health (yes, he has health they don’t tell you about) is pointless when no amount of damage will actually “defeat” him. Its customizable nature also allows you to cover your entire screen in unhinged garbage for no reason, which is the kind of commitment to the bit I actually admire more than anything else. I don’t remotely understand it, but I guess I at least respect it in a weird way.
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