Yoshi's New Game Rethinks What A Platformer Can Be
Overview & Key Takeaways
Nintendo was a trailblazer of the platformer genre, but violence has always been baked into its formula. One of the very first things you do, in the very first Super Mario Bros. game, is stomp on a Goomba. Yoshi games have typically skewed to the younger side of Nintendo's target audience, but they're often still recognizable as traditional, if gentle, platformers. Yoshi's next game, Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, is so gentle it has eliminated combat almost entirely. You can't die. You mostly don't eliminate enemies. But in its place, Nintendo has found an inventive new hook focused on creative play.
The eponymous Mysterious Book here is Mister Encyclopedia, aka Mr. E, a talking compendium of all the various flora and fauna that inhabit this land. His pages have gone blank, and he asks for the Yoshis' help restoring them. That framing makes your job squarely about research and observation, which in turn makes the proceedings mostly peaceful and playful.
To aid in the research, Yoshi's 2D moveset is even more generous than usual. You can still grab things with your tongue, but it's multidirectional. You can aim eggs using the right stick. You can flutter-jump seemingly endlessly, which keeps you at a steady height but can't keep reaching perpetually higher. And you can use a tail-swipe move to have a creature ride on your back, or switch between them. You're always Yoshi, but which rider is with you can have different effects. With this suite of moves in tow, you can open up the book and peer into its pages, using Mr. E's magnifying glass monocle to identify which creature habitat you want to examine. Then your chosen Yoshi will jump into the book and start poking around.
Nintendo was a trailblazer of the platformer genre, but violence has always been baked into its formula. One of the very first things you do, in the very first Super Mario Bros. game, is stomp on a Goomba. Yoshi games have typically skewed to the younger side of Nintendo's target audience, but they're often still recognizable as traditional, if gentle, platformers. Yoshi's next game, Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, is so gentle it has eliminated combat almost entirely. You can't die. You mostly don't eliminate enemies. But in its place, Nintendo has found an inventive new hook focused on creative play.
The eponymous Mysterious Book here is Mister Encyclopedia, aka Mr. E, a talking compendium of all the various flora and fauna that inhabit this land. His pages have gone blank, and he asks for the Yoshis' help restoring them. That framing makes your job squarely about research and observation, which in turn makes the proceedings mostly peaceful and playful.
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Now Playing: Yoshi's New Game Rethinks What A Platformer Can Be
To aid in the research, Yoshi's 2D moveset is even more generous than usual. You can still grab things with your tongue, but it's multidirectional. You can aim eggs using the right stick. You can flutter-jump seemingly endlessly, which keeps you at a steady height but can't keep reaching perpetually higher. And you can use a tail-swipe move to have a creature ride on your back, or switch between them. You're always Yoshi, but which rider is with you can have different effects. With this suite of moves in tow, you can open up the book and peer into its pages, using Mr. E's magnifying glass monocle to identify which creature habitat you want to examine. Then your chosen Yoshi will jump into the book and start poking around.
The result is a vibe that is much more cozy than the usual platformer. For example, the very first tutorial stage focuses on Crazee Dayzee, the little living flowers from Yoshi's Island. While exploring the stage, I discovered that they taste sweet if you swallow them, and also that you can carry one on your back. If you're carrying them around, they can make nearby flowers bloom, but you can also make flowers bloom by tossing one. You can get them muddy, and then wash them off, and also use them to bloom big flower platforms, and so on. The stages aren't structured like a traditional platformer with a left-to-right structure and a finish line. Instead they're open environments that conclude once you've made a particularly notable and special discovery. In the case of Crazee Dayzee, that meant blooming three big flowers together.
The second stage was slightly more traditional, as it had "enemies" that posed a threat. Sort of. Swarms of Bunchabees would attack me, but this is also how I discovered that Yoshi had no life bar. You'll get stunned for a moment, but that's all. The Bunchabee stage was mostly about avoiding danger and seeing how they react to different stage elements. They make good egg fodder, for example, and you can quickly disperse them with an egg if necessary. The stage ended when I gathered all five Smiley Flowers, some of which were guarded by the bees.
And since you're a budding anthropologist, each time you finish a stage, you're given the opportunity to name the new creature you discovered. Mr. E will make a suggestion that offers their official canonical name, but you can call them whatever you'd like, and that name will populate throughout all the stages and any future mentions of them. It's a neat feature that I'm sure kids will get a kick out of.
Yoshi and the Mysterious Book
And so the stages go, remarkably gentle but packed full of things to explore and do and find. I never completed all of the research in any habitat in a single go, and every time you reach your goal, the game will drop a hint about a behavior or interaction that you didn't find yet. You can also pay a small amount of coins to get another hint, or a large amount for it to spell out the objective more clearly. If you happen to stumble across a new creature behavior in a later stage, outside of its own habitat, the book will populate that into the correct section.
The stages included a puffy weed called Scatterpuff that spreads and attaches to everything and can even be used to break through rocks when it takes root, a musical toad named Croakaoke that gives out notes when you bounce on it, and a frog-like creature with a hoop for a mouth that blows bubbles. Those bubbles could be floated inside and combined with a flutter-jump to reach higher spots, but you could also get the frog muddy to make its bubbles heavy and sink down to the ground. After a short break, I played a later portion with more complex interactions and recognizable characters: Shy Guys (or as I named them, Bashful Boys) and Little Mousers.
In the Shy Guy habitat, I had to find all of them hiding around the environment, while also seeing how they interact with Yoshi and the other creatures. In the case of Little Mousers, they kept stealing my stuff, so I had to chase them down or sometimes take advantage of their pilfering abilities to reach through narrow corridors and retrieve items for me. But being later in the game with more creatures around also led to more special interactions between characters. In the Mouser stage, there were a few Shy Guys who needed to return home, so I got them there--but if you threw a Mouser in there with them, they panicked and ran. In a stage centered around Yoshi's watermelon-seed-spitting ability, I discovered that if I munched on a hot pepper, his seeds would be rapid-fire and whittle things down that much faster. If I introduced that same hot pepper to a Croakaoke, it would react with a spicy tongue and bounce me up much higher.
The list goes on and on. This freeform structure gives lots of room to just play around in stages, experiment, and see what happens. Some objectives are more like traditional Yoshi stage design, like capturing flowers, while others are more like minigames, like finding the hidden Shy Guys (ahem, Bashful Boys). It's a very inviting and flexible way to structure stages.
The closest the game came to recognizable platformer combat was in the final stage I tried, with a drill-nosed swine called a Hauger. In that stage, jumping onto its back or grabbing its tail would send it into a drilling fury, letting you break through rocks and drill through dirt to find secrets. The stage culminated in a boss fight against Kamek and Bowser Jr., riding in a UFO contraption. That encounter was mostly about getting down the timing to aim the Hauger upwards toward the ship, but since Yoshi can't get hurt, it was very low-stakes as boss battles go.
Yoshi and the Mysterious Book
Gallery
And I would be remiss not to mention how gorgeous all of this looks. Yoshi and his companions outside the book look the way you've come to expect from Nintendo's animated style. But inside the book, where you spend the majority of your time, there's a lovely colored-pencil aesthetic, with a skipped-frames effect to imitate a pixel-art game, and flourishes like backwards-script writing as if you're seeing through some of the pages. It's a lovely effect and really gives Yoshi and the Mysterious Book a sense of personality and charm that wouldn't be achieved with a more straightforward visual style.
It remains to be seen how Yoshi and the Mysterious Book sustains its entire length. I only played two chapters, and at times it seemed more like a toy to tinker with than a traditional platforming game. But there's something novel at the heart of this reconceptualized idea of a platformer, eschewing combat in favor of play and discovery. It's not something I'd want to see applied across the board, but on a continuum of Yoshi games becoming more inviting for younger players, it fits like a glove.
