Fresh from his big screen debut in The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, GameCentral goes hands-on with Yoshi’s first major adventure on the Nintendo Switch 2.
Given Mario’s dinosaur steed headlined one of the greatest video games of all time, Yoshi’s track record has been oddly unremarkable since. After Yoshi’s Island, the likes of Yoshi’s Story, Yoshi’s Woolly World, and Yoshi’s Crafted World have largely repeated the same framework with a stronger steer towards young kids, while Yoshi’s Touch & Go on the Nintendo DS felt like a glorified tech demo to fill the gap before Nintendo’s next blockbuster.
This same B-tier expectation has been hanging over Yoshi And The Mysterious Book since it was announced. The lush, cuddly aesthetic is intact, albeit more painterly compared to recent fabric-inspired entries, and the pitch once again taps into Yoshi’s younger skew. It’s a platformer where the emphasis isn’t on difficult obstacle gauntlets, but experimentation with various creatures inside the pages of a magical encyclopaedia.
It’s all undeniably adorable, but Yoshi’s next adventure – based on our hands-on preview session – has a stronger gameplay hook than you might expect. If you’d written it off as another stop-gap for younger fans, Yoshi And The Mysterious Book might surprise you with the creative teeth packed into its mechanical toybox.
As the name implies, the game is hinged around a talking book named Mr. E, who has one of the finest moustache in the Mushroom Kingdom – which is up against some pretty stiff competition. A gaggle of Yoshi volunteer to uncover the secrets of the creatures hidden within its pages, with the book serving as both a gateway into levels and a record to track your progression.
Each ‘chapter’ in the book consists of an illustrated double-page spread which houses different critters themed around an environment. In the first chapter, titled Wildwoods, we were gradually introduced to the game’s rhythm. When a creature bounds into view in the pages, you inspect them with a magnifying glass to log their existence. Some are window dressing curiosities, but the notable wildlife can be investigated further in tailored levels to record their behaviours.
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The first organism you’re shown is a small flower. As Yoshi, it’s your job to interact with the flower in various ways to learn more about it in a bespoke environment designed to show off its capabilities. In this case, the flower can make buds bloom, so Yoshi can carry it on its back, or hurl it up into the air, to make buds blossom on bushes. You have to use Yoshi’s skillset to reach the highest bushes, like sliding down a hill and launching into the dinosaur’s classic flutter jump.
Each discovery you make about a creature – including how it interacts with environmental elements like water or Yoshi’s various abilities – earns you a star. While there’s an exit to find in each level (alternatively you can just leave via the menu), your overall progress is tied to stars you accumulate through these logged interactions or discoveries, which opens up new chapters with creatures (and, in turn, levels) to dig into.
It starts off in basic fashion with the flower, but things become more interesting as new lifeforms are thrown into the mix. In the first chapter, there are musical toad-looking creatures you bounce on in succession to replicate pieces of music, fluff you spread around to weaken and smash rocks, and frogs who blow bubbles you can float on. Alternatively, if you douse the frog in mud, it will blow brown bubbles which sink instead, opening up new pathways below ground thanks to the moisture.
Beyond the opening world, we got to try out the fourth chapter titled Settled Valley. One level tasks you with finding seven Shy Guys, and when you pick one of them up using Yoshi’s tail flick, they help guide you to the next one’s rough proximity. Our favourite creature, at least design wise, was a hula hoop bird, which you can bounce items and critters between – or crack other bird eggs on – to launch yourself around and find secret areas.
While the mechanics themselves aren’t exactly new, Yoshi And The Mysterious Book feels distinctive in the way you approach levels. Some have a more defined end goal, in traditional Super Mario fashion, but often you’re just experimenting with a cluster of creatures in a specific space to solve a puzzle or discover hidden secrets.
For example, we found a baby variant of an explosive nut creature by bouncing off a musical toad and hurling the Voltorb-looking bomb at some rocks at the top of a tree. You can combine abilities in other ways to uncover stars as well, like blowing bubbles around bloomed flowers or, if Yoshi swallows a melon and a chili pepper in succession, you can spit flaming pips to discover new creature behaviours.
In some ways, it brought to mind Animal Well, in how you’re discovering new ways to use tools and mechanics you’re presented with – albeit in more open-ended levels. We should point out, solving these puzzles isn’t always easy either.
We were left stumped at several points, tossing around frogs erratically to try and uncover new uses for them, only to have the ‘a-ha’ moment when we worked out the solution. We do wonder if young kids might lose patience with its puzzle-based nature, but there are hints to new behaviours inside Mr. E’s pages if you need a nudge.
For older gamers, there appears to be more challenging arenas beneath the surface. After completing a level, you can return to the same zone and take on a different challenge built around the same mechanics, including a more complex run of the aforementioned bouncing musical toads.
It’s a promising sign that there’s more replay value than meets the eye, as on the menu screen, we could only see room for six chapters in total (which might explain its cheaper £49.99/£58.99 price tag, for digital and physical, respectively).
We’ve come this far and not mentioned one aspect Nintendo was particularly keen to hammer home: every creature in the encyclopaedia can be given a name of your choosing. It’s a neat gimmick to give the book some personalisation, but there’s sadly no awkward audio pronunciations akin to Tomodachi Life. The character limit is pretty small too, where we had to settle for ‘Short Stac’ on the introductory flower, but thankfully ‘Derek’ and ‘Big Tony’ made the cut.
Additionally, it’s worth emphasising how excellent Yoshi And The Mysterious Book looks. All the animations emulate a stop-motion style with purposefully lower frame rates, and there’s a neat paintbrush effect which decorates the backgrounds whenever you make a new discovery, which only adds to the idea that you’re navigating through an ever-changing book.
While we have questions around its longevity and scope, we came away from Yoshi And The Mysterious Book more intrigued by it conceptually than we expected to be. To an extent, it is reframing familiar platformer tropes – with different creatures tied to mechanics instead of items or power-ups – but there’s a creative playfulness in the way you discover abilities, and secrets, which distinguishes it from Nintendo’s well-worn history in the genre. If it can maintain the surprises throughout, this might be Yoshi’s strongest adventure in quite some time.
Formats: Nintendo Switch 2
Price: £49.99
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo
Release Date: 21st May 2026
Age Rating: 7+
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