Yoshi And The Mysterious Book review – a bestiary of a game

The latest Yoshi game is far more inventive than just another 2D platformer, with a menagerie of bizarre new critters that open up some fascinatingly unique gameplay experiences.

Nintendo really does have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to widely recognisable characters, especially as most of them have been underexploited in terms of standalone games. Mario and Luigi do fine on their own, but Princess Peach only has a few games to herself (the most recent by the same developer as this) and none of them are very good. And until Donkey Kong Bananza, DK was living in a limbo of Mario Party cameos and low budget spin-offs.

Yoshi is in a similar position, where his roles in Super Mario World 1 and 2 are iconic but his solo career has been mostly unremarkable, with little consistency in terms of quality or the nature of the games – although they do all tend to be 2D platformers.

At first sight The Mysterious Book seems to be just more of the same, with a high concept gimmick that feels like it could’ve worked with any character. That is true, and for the first couple of hours the game struggles to find its footing, but by the end it’s one of the most interesting games Nintendo has published in quite a while – even if it didn’t necessarily have to involve Yoshi at all.

Nintendo is sometimes criticised for what is perceived to be too many sequels, but The Mysterious Book is proof that while the same characters might be constantly recycled it’s really just a way to sell games that, if they were entirely new IPs, might struggle to attract interest.

The story here is incredibly contrived but, inevitably, completely unimportant. It involves Bowser Jr. stealing a talking book, which he then drops (but also gets caught inside) and which turns out to be a sort of animal encyclopaedia. Except all the information has been lost and you, as one of variously coloured Yoshis, have to enter the environments within the book to study the animals and record their habits and abilities.

That all makes about as much sense as it sounds but it’s a very mellow game, where Yoshi can’t die, can flutter jump infinitely, and there’s very little real combat. Instead, each level is focused on a different creature, some of which are taken from Yoshi’s usual menagerie of enemies, such as Shy Guys and Goonies, but most of which are brand new.

The game is very freeform and while you’re encouraged to try out all your various moves on a new critter, including trying to eat them, you’re rarely told what the overriding goal of each level is. It’s usually pretty easy to work out, as the game builds up to it organically (and you can unlock in-game hints) but it’s never the same thing twice. So you can be trying to make weird blob monsters spawn into ever more gigantic forms, hatching peculiar hula-hooping chickens, and uncovering an ancient tablet depicting the lifecycle of a slug boomerang.

Each level is very small and the platforming requires only a nominal amount of skill. Once you start making progress you begin to realise what the game is doing, with each creature offering unique gameplay elements that would’ve been too complex for a straight platformer but are here allowed to take centre stage. It’s essentially a deconstruction of a normal 2D Mario game, where the levels are designed primarily around the power-ups, rather than the player.

A lot of the critters you could certainly imagine as power-ups in other games, such as a sentient butterfly net, a jellyfish jetpack, and a skate/surfboard combo. There’s also a range of larger enemies that you can ride or otherwise control, including a giant plant creature that spits Yoshi out like one of his own eggs, two variants of tunnelling creature, and a giant fish. Others become boss battles, where you’re trying to rescue Bowser Jr. and Kamek, or there’s one memorable level that’s a sort of child friendly survival horror, where you’re being stalked by a scythe-wielding, leaf-covered monster.

Rather than running out of ideas as it goes on the game only gets more inventive, with a Mothra-like hang-glider, a giant poisonous cloud of gas, and weird worm things that you can pull and move like long pieces of elastic. Some of the concepts are so intrinsically fun, like the spider-like creature where you throw a ball of webbing to act as an anchor point, as you swing across the screen, that they could probably have been the basis for a whole spin-off adventure on their own.

The game is oddly structured, in that there’s a boss battle after the sixth world, complete with end credits, but then everything just continues on for several worlds after that, where many of the more bizarre creatures are. There’s even some post-game (or rather post-post-game) content that starts to get quite tricky, which is welcome.

Yoshi And The Mysterious Book is charmingly inessential but it’s far more compelling than it first seems. Although there is a primary goal to each level there’s a dozen or more smaller ones that usually involve using the abilities of the creatures in unexpected ways, to uncover hidden areas or items. There are peppers or fruits on most levels, that alter a creature’s status and many have babies hiding around somewhere for you to find.

You can leave a level at any time but also re-enter it after achieving the main goal to see what else you can discover, with each area dotted with platforms that seem temptingly out of reach or rocks or other obstacles that it feels certain you should be able to do something with – and you always can.

As slight as the game feels at first there’s much more content here than it initially appears and it’s very good at tempting you to return to a level, with a little ink blot creature indicating stages of particular interest – as well as other hints before you start, that there’s something you haven’t done yet.

The graphics are a bit low-tech, and not as good as they seemed to be from the initial trailer, but overall this a surprisingly engrossing and inventive game. It does feel as if the sandbox nature of the experience could have been expanded a bit, perhaps by throwing in a greater variety of creatures into each level, but that’s the sort of thing sequels are for. And unlike most recent Yoshi games this definitely deserves one.

Formats: Nintendo Switch 2
Price: £49.99
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Good-Feel
Release Date: 21st May 2026
Age Rating: 7

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