YOSHI AND THE MYSTERIOUS BOOK

I’ve been playing YOSHI games since the original YOSHI’S ISLAND on SNES, and I still have a few nightmares about chasing the crying Baby Mario across the screen while the rescue timer ran down. So when YOSHI AND THE MYSTERIOUS BOOK arrived on Nintendo Switch 2, I wanted to pass that history down to my four-year-old. We beat the MYSTERIOUS BOOK together over several play sessions, and I left the experience enamored with its experimental gameplay.

Good-Feel has always had a knack for a tactile gimmick, from the yarn of YOSHI’S WOOLLY WORLD to the construction paper of YOSHI’S CRAFTED WORLD. In MYSTERIOUS BOOK, they built the entire game around discovery. It won me over most when it made us experiment our way out of a level instead of sprinting to the flagpole. The catch is that the same experimentation that feels fresh in a short sitting starts to thin out over a longer campaign.

My son enjoyed it, but when I asked him to rank it, he still put SUPER MARIO 3D WORLD: BOWSER’S FURY ahead of it. He wanted the action and momentum of BOWSER’S FURY, and BOOK is, by design, a slower, gentler thing.

Final Thought: YOSHI AND THE MYSTERIOUS BOOK isn’t quite the page-turner Nintendo intended, but it’ll still go down as a fantastic experiment, one whose comfy discovery mechanics should lead to some great Nintendo games in the future.

It’s a Nintendo Switch 2 exclusive, and it’s out now.