Yoshi and the Mysterious Book Review

The Moment Mr. E Changed My Expectations

About three hours into Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, I was surfing on a living surfboard creature across rolling waves, a bubble-blowing frog perched on my back, its transparent spheres floating me up toward a secret ledge I had no business reaching. When I landed and Mr. E scribbled a new entry into his pages right there in the level, complete with a little drawing of exactly what I'd just done, I put the controller down for a second. Not because I was frustrated. Because I wanted to sit with how unexpectedly good that felt.

I went in expecting another Yoshi game in the mold of Woolly World or Crafted World: charming, gentle, a little shallow. What I got was something that has almost nothing in common with those games except the protagonist and his moveset.

What This Game Actually Is

Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is a Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive developed by Good-Feel, the studio behind the previous two Good-Feel Yoshi entries. This is their third game with the character, and the most radical departure by far. The premise: a living encyclopedia named Mr. E crash-lands on Yoshi's Island, his pages blank, his memory gone. He recruits the Yoshis to dive into his chapters and document the creatures living there by interacting with them every way they can imagine. Bowser Jr. and Kamek are also trapped inside the book, searching for something of their own, and they provide the game's loose dramatic spine.

That description does not fully prepare you for what it feels like to play. This is not a game about reaching a finish line. There is no finish line. Each level is built around a single creature and its ecosystem, and the goal is simply to learn everything about it. You eat it and Mr. E notes the flavor. You carry it on your back and discover its passive ability. You feed it a pepper and something happens that the game rewarded you for trying. Everything triggers a discovery. The level ends when you make the main discovery, but you can stay as long as you want, chasing the dozens of secondary ones.

The structure is divided into six main chapters, each representing a biome, expandable to ten after you reach the first set of credits. Chapters unlock by accumulating stars earned from discoveries. The entire economy of the game runs on curiosity.

Learning What These Creatures Can Do

Yoshi's core moveset carries over unchanged: flutter jump, tongue grab, egg throw, ground pound, tail flick to load creatures onto his back. The flutter jump in this game is effectively unlimited, which I want to address directly because it sounds like it would remove all tension from platforming. It does remove the tension from platforming. That is the point. The challenge has been relocated.

Every creature in Mr. E's book functions as its own mechanics puzzle. The Glubbit, a frog with a bubble-wand head, blows bubbles you can ride. Put it on your back and it produces bubbles as you run. Feed it an apple and the bubbles grow larger. Feed it something spicy and the bubbles turn red and behave differently. Each of those reactions is a discovery, and finding them required me to actually think about what I had in my toolkit and what I hadn't tried yet.

The Slugarang is shaped like a boomerang and returns to you when thrown. Avoid catching it and it accelerates, bashing through walls. A bird-shaped creature with an umbrella cap lets you glide on updrafts. A jellyfish fills with water and functions as a jetpack until you need to refuel from a water source. A spider weaves web-strand platforms you can swing from. A hula-hooping bird whose hoop you can swap out for different ring types, each with different effects.

None of this is told to you. You find it by doing. I named the Glubbit something inadvisable and then watched my ridiculous name appear in Mr. E's notes every time it came up. The naming mechanic is a small thing but it works; the creatures feel like discoveries rather than obstacles.

As you progress, creatures from earlier chapters start appearing in new ones, and what you learned about them in their own levels suddenly becomes a tool. A creature you studied in Chapter 2 shows up in a Chapter 4 level, and the interaction between them unlocks a discovery you couldn't have made before. The game is building a cross-referenced ecosystem out of your own catalogue of knowledge, and the moments when that clicks are genuinely satisfying.

Later chapters introduce a mechanic that briefly stopped me cold: the ability to summon any creature you've previously met. Suddenly every hour of research has a practical application. You need to scale a waterfall and you have to decide which creature's ability gets you there. The game at that moment becomes something close to a sandbox built from your own research. I wish this had arrived earlier and been built around more extensively. It is the clearest expression of what the game's concept is capable of, and it only fully emerges in the final hours.

The Challenge

Yoshi cannot die. Enemies bump him aside. Pits respawn him nearby. There is no health bar in any visible form. I want to be clear about what this means in practice: the challenge is entirely mental. Some discoveries are genuinely tricky to find. The hint system, which lets you spend in-game tokens to get a clue about a missing discovery, is available when you're stuck, but using it feels like a concession. The better play is to think about what you haven't tried.

That said, certain levels lean too hard on trial-and-error without giving enough context, and a handful of physics-adjacent interactions, particularly involving surfing creatures and wave mechanics, control with less precision than the rest of the game. These are the low points. They aren't frequent, but they're noticeable because everything else is so well-tuned.

The boss encounters are creative but consequence-free. They function more as spectacle than challenge. You're often rescuing Bowser Jr. and Kamek from the creatures rather than fighting anyone, which is a clever inversion of the usual structure, but it means the game never asks you to apply what you've learned under pressure.

The Modular UI

After the first credits roll, you unlock Exploration Tools: UI elements you can purchase with the Smiley Flowers you've been collecting and arrange on your screen border however you want. A flower radar is genuinely useful. A graph of Yoshi's jump height is not, but I found myself applying it anyway just to watch. There's even a health bar that, true to the no-death philosophy, can never actually reach zero. The whole system is strange and I mean that as a compliment. It commits completely to the bit.

A Living Picture Book

Yoshi games have a history of using their art direction as a central design statement. This one uses a stop-motion-influenced picture book style: hand-drawn creatures animated at reduced frame rates, watercolor backgrounds, colored pencil shading, and edges that fade to uncolored pencil sketches when you reach the margins of a level, because you've walked off the illustrated page.

In docked mode at 4K, it is a beautiful game. The creature designs range from charming to genuinely inventive, and the amount of detail packed into what are actually very small levels is impressive. New discoveries are drawn directly onto the level surface as you make them, stamped into the environment as visible records of what you've done. The world is visibly changed by your research.

In handheld mode, the ink outlines on characters and edges soften considerably, approaching pixelated in motion. The game runs on Unreal Engine 5 and maintains 60 frames per second during play on Switch 2, with some hitching on load screens. These are real concessions to handheld play that are worth knowing before you commit.

The soundtrack is serviceable. It builds the warm, calm atmosphere the game needs, and several levels feature musical creature interactions where the audio becomes part of the puzzle. Those moments are excellent. Outside of them, the music is pleasant but forgettable compared to the best Yoshi soundtracks. The creature sound effects are strong; every new creature has a personality expressed partly through how it sounds.

What Doesn't Fully Work

The game has no multiplayer. None. Not even an assist mode. For a game built around shared wonder and experimentation, the absence of a second player is felt. The previous two Good-Feel Yoshi games both had co-op. This one removes it without replacement, which limits how it works as a family game despite everything about it pointing at that audience.

The discovery hunting hits a wall during cleanup. The first pass through a level is a consistent series of moments where something new happens. The second and third passes, when you're chasing the final few discoveries you missed, can feel more like running the same small space over and over. The hint system exists precisely for this and works reasonably well, but the late-game tedium of some completionist runs is real.

The story is almost nothing. It provides enough scaffolding to move between chapters and gives Bowser Jr. something to do, but it has no payoff in proportion to the setup. If you come looking for narrative, you will not find it.

Verdict

If you want a game that tests your platforming reflexes and scales a difficulty curve, this isn't it. Set that expectation aside and Yoshi and the Mysterious Book delivers something almost no other platformer does: a game built entirely around paying attention. It rewards the instinct to try things, to combine what you've learned, to ask what happens if you do the unexpected thing. The creature designs are dense with personality, the art direction is among the best in the series, and the core discovery loop maintains its appeal for the full runtime.

You will get the most out of it in shorter sessions, with the game played at a pace that matches its own rhythm rather than pushed. Approached that way, it earns its place in the Switch 2 library and then some.

Score: 8.0 / 10

-- The Gaming Vanguard