Yoshi & The Mysterious Book

I've been meaning to get back to writing more longform reviews about the new games I play, but playing Yoshi & The Mysterious Book was what really clinched it. I have so many thoughts about this new Yoshi game, and I just need to let them all out.

The Switch 2 has had easily Nintendo's most experimental game library since the Gamecube. A Mario Kart game with parkour and movement tech? A 3D Donkey Kong game built around terrain deformation? A sequel to Kirby Air Ride? A Pokemon-themed Dragon Quest Builders sequel starring Ditto? A Splatoon looter shooter? Star Fox-themed vtubers? These are all such off-the-wall game concepts and yet, so far at least, they've all been consistently well-executed and surprisingly fun. No thanks to Nintendo's marketing, though. Their trailer game especially this year has been absolutely awful, with Pokemon Pokopia being a glaring example since they for some reason neglected to mention the game's stellar 20-30 hour campaign. This damn company is lucky I trust them with putting out quality games because if they were anyone else, these trailers would've gotten me to walk away and never look back. And no game got hit with this worse than Yoshi & The Mysterious Book.

Yoshi & The Mysterious Book had some of the absolute worst trailers I have ever seen in a game, with each one slowly walking you through a single level in the first world. You know, the boring tutorial levels with the most basic puzzles. The concept of researching Yoshi's Island's enemies seemed cool but the actual gameplay looked very guided and mindless. The patronizing narration that was clearly meant to appeal to little kids definitely didn't help matters either. By the time the game reached its review embargo, I feel like most people still didn't know what Mysterious Book was even about and most the footage we saw looked really dull. But having played the game myself, I'm happy to say Nintendo did this game a serious disservice. Those trailers didn't even come close to showing off Mysterious Book's creative puzzles, varied mechanics, immense personality, and surprisingly unhinged energy. This is not just a traditional Yoshi game, this is the most experimental first-party Nintendo game I've seen since the original Chibi Robo.

So before I do anything, I want to clear the air in terms of what Yoshi & The Mysterious Book is, because I don't think the trailers really captured it super well. This game initially seems like an unassuming cozy game about researching the various species of Yoshi's Island, but very quickly it devolves into what I can only describe as pure chicanery. See, Yoshi is a physics-platformer at its core, and making discoveries will often require you to toss creatures around and just see what happens. Feeding them different types of food, tossing them at each other, forcing interactions with other creatures, and solving a variety of contextual mission objectives, pretty much anything and everything will lead to you making a discovery. You get so much freedom to just fuck around and find out, and by the time you finish a stage, it'll usually be left in a much worse state than when it started. It's a shockingly funny, almost immersive sim-esque gameplay loop. You even get those moments of unintentional comedy where you can stumble your way into a solution or just completely screw everything up, and some of the outcomes and discoveries are so wild and unhinged that they left me bursting out laughing.

The most divisive element of Mysterious Book is its lack of damage, which seems to indicate that the game is too easy and forgiving. I think this is missing the point because Mysterious Book isn't a traditional platformer, and it's not trying to be like Yoshi's Island. This is a puzzle game first and a platformer second, and I feel like a lot of the more negative reviews of Mysterious Book kinda miss that. The main focus here is on figuring out how to collect all the discoveries in a given stage, and the challenge is purely in the puzzle-solving and the execution of those puzzles. In this context, the lack of damage is outright necessary since several of the puzzles will straight-up require you to let creatures attack or hurt you, so having a healthbar would actively detract from the experience and de-incentive experimentation. And besides, plenty of the puzzles in this game do actually have fail-states so it's not like there's a complete lack of stakes. Just like in GoodFeel's other damageless game, Epic Yarn, going for 100% will absolutely still test you.

That being said, this is still a platformer so let's talk about Yoshi's movement which is the best it's ever been. He plays like he always has, but there's a lot of cool little touches that add to his movement. He sprints automatically and can do an instant jump U-turn that keeps your speed, he can slide down hills, and when he's holding an creature, you can even do a triple jump. My favorite addition however is the ability to throw eggs with the right analog stick, giving you the freedom of aim of Yoshi's Story but without killing the pace. It feels so natural that I'm genuinely surprised it took this long for GoodFeel to implement this. Beyond that, the main mechanic is the Tail Swipe which lets you toss a creature or object onto your back. Sometimes this just boils down to letting you carry stuff around, but it occasionally gives Yoshi a new ability like a fish that lets you swim, a duck that lets you fish, a spider that lets you cling and swing on walls and ceilings, and a mole that lets you dig around. These one-off movement enhancements gives the game so much variety and the way it all ties into the tail swipe prevents these gameplay shifts from feeling unfocused.

And speaking of variety, let's get into the level design. Each level in Mysterious Book is an open sandbox without a clear endgoal, and the game leaves it up to you to figure out what you need to do. I was worried Mr E would start spoiling puzzles but I'm pleased to say he never did, he only comments on the discoveries you do make. And that's good because, as mentioned, the puzzles here are really great. This game never holds your hand, you're usually expected to figure out how these creatures work on your own, and all the levels feel like these meticulously crafted puzzle boxes and figuring out how everything clicks together is always super satisfying. The variety in stages is also insane especially once you get to World 2. Every level introduces a new creature, fleshes them out, and then tosses them aside to move onto the next one. From a stealth level, to a level about rescuing Crazee Dayzees from urchins, to a trading sequence with Shy Guys, to several rhythm-focused stages, to an entire world where you're tiny, to some crazy chase setpieces that have you riding giant creatures, this game constantly left me guessing as to what unique scenario I'd encounter next. Mysterious Book has the same manic unpredictability of some of the best platformers like Super Mario 3D World, DKC Tropical Freeze, and Astro Bot which is no small feat.

However, I do have a few small gripes. As I hinted at earlier, World 1 was pretty slow going. Most of the levels in this world had fairly basic puzzles and a lack of mechanical variety, it's very clearly the tutorial phase of the game. Once you get to World 2, the quality immediately picks up with more chaotic and quirky scenarios, and then World 3 starts to really introduce all the fun gameplay shifts. Past that point, Mysterious Book just keeps getting better and better, amping up the creativity even further just when you think it can't get even more fun. Aside from that, my bigger issue with Mysterious Book is that some of the levels just felt too damn short. Like I get it, most of these stages are meant to be really dense puzzle-boxes, but I occasionally felt kinda sad to see the level exit portal because I was having so much fun with that level's mechanic and really wanted to see more of it. Thankfully, this does improve by the second half so this is more of an early game issue.

However, the short level length is more than made up for by the sheer amount of them. Mysterious Book seemed like a pretty short game from the overview trailer which only showed off six worlds, but little did I know that it barely scratched the surface of how beefy this game actually is. Once you beat those six worlds and roll the normal credits, you unlock the game's second act which unveils an entire four additional worlds all with new creatures to discover. And then when you beat the true ending, you unlock two more postgame worlds with more challenge-focused stages. There's over 70 stages in Mysterious Book, more than in any Yoshi game, and simply beating it casually will take around 10-20 hours. But that's not getting into all the optional stuff. There's a lot of discoveries to make, around 30-ish in each level adding up to around 2000 total, not to mention all the hidden Daisies that can unlock a variety of customizable UI elements to mess around with. Not to mention the fact that several levels have revisits, and you can fully customize Mr E's layouts by moving around the page entries and renaming the creatures however you want. Don't let this game's unassuming exterior fool you, it's as content-rich and ambitious as you'd hope for from a Switch 2 game.

That being said, this does lead into my last and probably biggest issue with Mysterious Book. GoodFeel once again made a game with a frustrating 100% though thankfully not as bad as Crafted World. The more dense level design, lack of forced backtracks for pixel-hunting fetch quests, quick reset in the pause menu, and hint system do help to mitigate a lot of the tedium that game had. And you should be able to get all the Daisies and most of the discoveries without much hassle. That being said, those last few discoveries are kind of insane requiring a pretty much perfectly-executed order of operations, and messing up at one point may occasionally force you to restart the level entirely. Other discoveries require you to basically do precise platforming with some of the aforementioned movement mechanics, which can often be super fun in the context of a freeform sandbox but don't quite hold up as well when doing precision platforming. One particular postgame level took me over 20 minutes purely because of creature jank and it got very annoying. It's not a complete deal-breaker and I'd rather the optional content be straight-up challenging than blatant padding, but I will say to expect a bit of frustration if you decide to go for every single discovery and try to take your time with it.

As far as presentation goes, GoodFeel has always excelled in this aspect, though I'd argue Mysterious Book is their strongest effort since Kirby's Epic Yarn. Most of their Switch era games suffered from poor resolution or excessive bloom, but the Switch 2 allowed them to bring out a much more vibrant and polished visual landscape. The more cartoony and surreal enemy designs and naturalistic environments make this the closest any Yoshi game has come to replicating the gorgeous pastel artwork of the original, it's a real treat to behold. Every creature you meet is also given so much love and personality, there's a ton of blink-and-miss it animations to spot in even the most unassuming NPCs. But the main highlight for me was easily the Crazee Dayzee, an often overlooked Mario enemy who basically shares the spotlight with Yoshi in this game, showing up in pretty much every level and constantly getting itself into unique situations. My only gripe with Mysterious Book's visuals are simply that it looks a bit fuzzier on handheld, but not enough to diminish the game's sheer artistic charm.

The soundtrack was an aspect I was definitely pretty worried about at first since half of Yoshi's OSTs have been infamously lacking both due to repetitive melodies that overuse the game's central leitmotif and often ear-grating sound design. Crafted World in particular had easily the worst soundtrack in a GoodFeel game due to the decision to make every track sound like someone banging art supplies together. Thankfully, my fears were immediately satiated when I found out that Kumi Tanioka was doing the score. Tanioka composed the legendary Crystal Chronicles soundtrack and while Mysterious Book's OST isn't quite as stellar, she's able to put her usual medieval sound to great use here. Each level theme does use the same core leitmotif as always, but Tanioka goes a lot wilder with it than usual to the point where I hardly even recognize it sometimes. Also there's a lot of music too, way less repetition than most other Yoshi games. Beyond just the score though, the sound design in general is immaculate, most of the level themes are dynamic and get more energetic as you complete the stage. And pretty much everything you do is accentuated by a goofy sound effect, ala Chibi Robo. Compared to the fairly tepid Crafted World, I really can't underemphasize how much personality Mysterious Book is oozing.

Yoshi & The Mysterious Book has been such a joy to play. Its unique physics-based sandbox gameplay makes it feel unlike anything else I've ever seen, and the consistently creative mechanics keep it feeling fun and joyful to interact with for its surprisingly lengthy runtime. It's absolutely one of the best Yoshi games and the best GoodFeel game since Woolly World. However, I don't think it fully surpasses Woolly World mostly due to the occasional frustrating discoveries and creature jank. With just a bit more refinement, Mysterious Book could've been the best GoodFeel game since Epic Yarn, but even in its current state, it's still an absolute breath of fresh air.