Unlike previous entries in the Yoshi series, Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is more puzzle game than platformer, and it’s fixated on emphasizing the joy of discovery. Levels and stages are referred to as “biomes” and “habitats,” and you enter them through a sentient encyclopedia called Mr. E, who firmly emphasizes that your goal is to study regions and the creatures who live within them: “Just let your curiosity lead you.” While you’re required to make “key discoveries” in order to unlock new habitats, this exploration feels fun and intuitive, and it’s quite satisfying to watch as each new observation is colored in on Mr. E’s pages.
This being a Yoshi game, there’s a lot of licking and stomping and spitting involved in just how our green dinosaur friend goes about interacting with creatures across nearly 60 diverse habitats. One level provides you with a pair of colorless, gooey blobs (the game calls them Blorps, though Mr. E allows you to cook up your own name for them and every other creature you encounter). Without prompting, you’ll figure out that if you place them next to each other, they’ll create a third, born with the traits of both parental Blorps.
Elsewhere across Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, you can use the explosive, acorn-like Detonuts to restore the water flow in their region, find a balanced diet for the sand-digging Underbit, or help to reunite a scatterbrained Huffin Puffin with its children. Occasionally, Yoshi will be accompanied by a creature who can shapeshift into anything you’ve already encountered, serving to emphasize the unique design and utility of each creature.
An abundance of choices awaits you throughout, meaning that the game is quite accessible for audiences of all ages. Thanks to the magic that transports Yoshi within Mr. E’s pages, he’s effectively invulnerable, and this leaves the player free not just to experiment without consequences. There’s no penalty for trying to eat a spiky Ouchin, so why not?
While the lack of a traditional health meter removes the stakes from a few showdowns with Bowser Jr. and Kamek, who have gotten stuck within the encyclopedia, that’s no real loss (and it’s not really the point of the game). And while you can sometimes miss an opportunity to complete an observation—for one, it can be tricky to collect all the sentient Floofly clouds in their sidescrolling habitat—once you know what you’re looking for, you can easily return to each area, working toward a specific goal that can be completed in minutes.
The lack of pressure on the player—to fill every page of Mr. E’s book, to avoid enemies, to beat a timer—keeps the focus on experimentation. There are challenging tasks that require precision timing or clever combinations of the various fruits that Yoshi can use to transform certain creatures (a hot pepper for a sick singing toad, a heart fruit to tame a parasitic insect, an apple to refresh a dried-out daisy), but you can essentially skip anything that doesn’t bring you joy.
Where Yoshi and the Mysterious Book really shines, though, is in the way it makes the player shift gears from simply playing the game to thinking about how the game functions. Where Super Mario Bros. 3 gave us a Giant Land where enemies and blocks were suddenly larger, this game offers up a Miniworld biome that sees Mr. E. magnifying creatures that you probably overlooked in previous areas. The creatures are smaller, but this game makes you really appreciate how much thought went into the creation of the creatures and their environments.
This effect can also be seen in the way creatures interact with one another. As you progress through the game, sometimes a newly discovered creature will visit a previously visited habitat. This allows players to enter an alternative version of that stage—a hybrid, if you will—that focuses on how the newcomer might influence the environment. All this and more creates a vibrant, interconnected adventure where the hills are alive with the sound of Yoshi.
This game was reviewed with a code provided by Golin.
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