Yoshi and the Mysterious Book
Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is one of the franchise's strongest entries; a warm, inventive platformer that rewards exploration at every turn.
From the Author
Nintendo has always understood something that their competitors occasionally forget: the best platformers don't just ask you to get from point A to point B, they ask you to look around while you're doing it. That instinct has defined the Yoshi franchise (especially in entries like Yoshi's Island and since its earliest entries, and it has taken on new urgency as Nintendo navigates the Switch 2's launch window with a lineup that ranges from technically ambitious to quietly assured. Yoshi and the Mysterious Book falls closer to the latter; it does not announce itself loudly because it does not need to.
The game follows Yoshi through a storybook world assembled chapter by chapter as pages are recovered from a scattered tome, each section unlocking a new themed environment with its own visual identity and mechanical logic. The premise is thin, and the game knows it. This is not a title that asks you to invest emotionally in its narrative, and attempting to do so would be missing the point. The story functions as a chassis, a reason to move forward and a light structural frame on which something more interesting is built: a platformer that reinvents its own rules every level and trusts you to keep up.
What Yoshi and the Mysterious Book does better than almost anything in its genre right now is vary its own vocabulary without losing coherence. Each chapter introduces gameplay mechanics tied to its world, and the best of them feel genuinely inventive, drawing on a design philosophy Nintendo has been refining for years. The lineage is visible. Super Mario Wonder made the case that a platformer could surprise you at the level-by-level scale without sacrificing clarity, and Princess Peach: Showtime refined the rotating-mechanic structure further. Yoshi's execution is confident enough that the comparison reads as continuation rather than imitation, a franchise finding its place within a broader Nintendo design moment rather than scrambling to catch up to one. The art style reinforces this. It is warm and tactile, built to look like an illustrated children's book brought to life, and it holds up across the full runtime without feeling like a gimmick that wears thin. The score also matches it. It is thematically appropriate, occasionally surprising, and always memorable in the way good game music is memorable, which is to say you don't notice how effective it is until a track is stuck in your head three days later.
The exploration design is where the game earns its rating. Yoshi and the Mysterious Book rewards the curious player without punishing the one who just wants to move forward. Collectibles, namely the discoveries about each creature in the book, are hidden with enough craft that finding them feels like a small victory rather than a checklist obligation, and creative problem solving is baked into the level design in a way that scales naturally with how much effort you want to put in. For younger players and series newcomers, this is an ideal entry point, generous and legible without being condescending. For veterans, there is enough texture and invention to hold attention. That balance is harder to strike than it looks, and the game strikes it consistently.
That said, the game is not without friction. Not every gameplay variant introduced across the chapters lands with equal confidence, and it is worth being honest about where the design process appears to have applied less scrutiny. Glubbit, a bubble-based sequence built around a frog mechanic, is the clearest example. The controls feel imprecise in a way that turns what should be a fun diversion into something you are relieved to get through. Plumebrella, an umbrella-bird variant, has similar problems. Neither is a catastrophic failure, but they stand out in a game that otherwise handles its mechanical diversity well, and they point to an editorial inconsistency that a tighter development pass would have addressed.
The Switch 2 question is also worth raising directly, because it matters for how you situate the game in context. Yoshi and the Mysterious Book does not feel like a Switch 2 game in any meaningful visual or mechanical sense. Load times are fast and performance is clean, but nothing here feels like it could not have shipped on the original hardware. For a launch window title on a new console, that registers. Nintendo has demonstrated with Mario Kart World and Donkey Kong Bananza that the Switch 2 can do things its predecessor could not, but Yoshi, charming as it is, does not make that case. Whether this reflects a deliberate accessibility strategy or simply where the game was in its development cycle is hard to say from the outside, but it is the kind of decision that will look more or less defensible depending on what the rest of the year's lineup delivers around it.
None of that changes what the game is. At the end of the day, Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is one of the strongest entries the franchise has produced in some time, a platformer built with genuine affection for the series and for the players who come to it without much prior experience. It knows its audience and serves them well. A game that consistently makes you want to explore one more level before putting the controller down is doing its job, and this one does that job with enough craft and warmth that the rough edges read as what they are: minor blemishes on something incredibly good. Hopefully the team takes the feedback on the weaker variants to heart, because if a follow-up tightens those and pushes harder on what Switch 2 hardware can actually do, the ceiling here is very high.
Reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2.
