Yoshi And The Mysterious Book: The Kotaku Review

A few hours before writing this review, I turned in my review of Mina the Hollower, a game I adored. One of the things I love about it is how well it rewards and encourages curiosity and experimentation, and this is something I’ve loved in a lot of recent games including Blue Prince, Animal Well, and Titanium Court. You would think, given my love for secret-stuffed games that want you to try things just for the fun of it, Yoshi and the Mysterious Book would be a real page-turner for me. But while I love its picture-book aesthetic and a lot of its levels were a good time, there’s a hollowness at the center of this egg that I just can’t get past.

This is developer Good Feel’s third go at trying to establish a new identity for Yoshi, the somewhat sidelined Nintendo platforming mascot who’s been adrift amid a sea of, like, five other Nintendo platforming mascots. Yoshi and the Mysterious Book eschews the traditional platforming scaffolding altogether, getting rid of such things as “taking damage” or “dying,” and sends an invincible Yoshi into a giant, magical, creature encyclopedia to…read it, I guess, and tell him (the book) what he (the book) says about all the little dudes listed inside.

This takes the form of a series of levels, one per creature, in which Yoshi must learn all he can about the being in question by messing around with it and the environment to see how it reacts. In most levels, this consists of a fairly simple set of initial actions: try to eat it, hit it with an egg, ground-pound it, try to pick it up, carry it around, throw it, etc. Then, once you’ve established roughly what a creature is and how it works, you can start bouncing around the level and trying to use its powers in interesting ways. The earliest example, a walking flower creature named Crayzee-Dayzee Runflower (you can name every creature in the game, including established Yoshi enemies, whatever you want, which is hilarious) can be carried through flower buds to make them bloom, or fed items like apples or hot peppers to change their color and attributes. 

Most of the creatures involved are familiar Yoshi enemies with familiar behaviors, and Good Feel has gotten some surprising mileage out of their limited sets of powers. One of my favorite early game levels involves a series of Croakaokes that you can bounce on to create increasingly complex melodies. Another, for Ouchin, could have easily been boring given that you can’t touch it due to spikes, but Good Feel turned this level into a rescue mission where you save a bunch of Runflowers from being eaten. Detonuts Voltorbs, which explode at the slightest gust of wind, get a whole level themed around finding clever ways to stop them from exploding temporarily so you can use their kabooms in a strategic manner. There are tons of really good ideas here that never would have had a place in a traditional Yoshi platformer game, and I’m genuinely impressed at how versatile this cast of weird critters is given that they were mostly originally just designed to slow Yoshi down somehow.

While many creatures are friendly, some are hostile, like the Bunchabee Buzz Off that chase you around and try to sting you, or the anxiety-inducing Behedger No Thanks that hunts Yoshi through a stealth level. But Yoshi literally can’t die, even if attacked! He just makes a little “ow” sound and jumps, or at worst, falls and respawns immediately a few feet away. While this lack of consequence might bother some, I think it works here. Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is not a game about combat, nor even primarily about platforming well. It’s about experimentation, about messing around with creatures in all sorts of ways to get something to happen. That inevitably means getting hit a lot! If I had to restart the dang level whenever I got hit one too many times, I’d probably tear my hair out.

Because there are a lot of interactions to uncover. Most creatures have somewhere between 30-45 different discoveries to be made, and some are genuinely quite tricky to pull off. Most of my typical runs through a single level saw me walk out with between 10 and 20 discoveries, and some levels even have separate bonus stages of a sort, where the conditions of the level are slightly different in a way that enables you to make even more discoveries. It’s here that I think Yoshi and the Mysterious Book does a good job of straddling the line between being a game for kids and for adults. If you’re a kid with enough time and patience, you’ll still stumble over a lot of discoveries naturally, but some are obtuse enough that you really do need the secret-finding-sicko brain of an adult who was really into Animal Well to track them down unaided. Or just use the robust built-in hint system. Live your truth!

I am walking away from Yoshi and the Mysterious Book thinking it’s genuinely a great idea for Yoshi’s future. I love the idea of isolating the fun of secret hunting, an activity that Yoshi games have historically been excellent at even when the platforming wasn’t the best. But there’s something still nagging at me here. Looking at a list of all the levels I completed in Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, I think I genuinely enjoyed about 75 percent of them. But my memory of my time playing it is that I spent a lot of it just a little…bored. I’ve been struggling for the last few days to work out why that is.

I think some of it has to do with the lack of any kind of central driving force to what you’re doing. I don’t know why I’m hunting for secrets. I have no idea why I care about any of these creatures or what they do, or why Yoshi does. In fact, Yoshi is shockingly uninvolved in anything meaningful that happens in this game at all. Here’s the plot of the entire game, and I swear to you that while this contains spoilers, it will ruin absolutely nothing about your experience. In the first 15 minutes, Bowser Jr. gets sucked into a magic book. Kamek is already in the book looking for him. They find each other almost immediately. Bowser Jr. forces Kamek to help him find some magic bird he wants to see, and they fly off together. Then, at the end of the game, they encounter the bird. They escape the book, and go home. 

Yoshi and the Mysterious Book

• Back-of-the-box quote:

  “Tastes sweet, with notes of fluff and feathers.”

• Developer

  Good-Feel

• Type of game

  2D platforming exploration game

• Liked

  Wide variety of cute creatures with lots of discoveries, some fantastic big moments, several interesting twists on level types

• Disliked

  Some levels very clunky or otherwise frustrating, no real sense of purpose or urgency

• Platforms

  Nintendo Switch 2

• Release date

  May 21, 2026

• Played

  Around 12 hours, finished main story, dabbled in a few of the post-game levels

“But wait,” you ask, “isn’t this a Yoshi game?” It is! Yoshi, it turns out, is entirely incidental to the plot of Yoshi and the Mysterious Book. He does absolutely nothing of import. I’m not trying to claim that Yoshi needs to be involved in some grandiose plot for Yoshi and the Mysterious Book to be good. This is, effectively, a game about Mario’s horse, and Mario himself isn’t exactly a riveting protagonist. Nintendo’s whole thing is games centered around incredible play, not deep narratives. But I just don’t think Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is consistently strong enough an experience to earn the lack of urgency or motivation.

In its better levels, where the creatures you’re investigating have tons of fun and interesting interactions, this doesn’t matter. It’s fun to just be in a giant pool of bubblegum lava bouncing up and down with bigger and bigger and bigger Mildes Korbs until you go flying out of the top of a volcano. That bit’s great. But there are a number of weaker levels, too, such as the one where you help Huffin Puffin B. Bashful find its kids, or the one where you have to control an extremely large and twitchy Lunge Fish that refuses to go where you ask it to. OR, I’m sorry to say, there’s the final level, which was so mechanically clunky and confusing that I ended up having to brute force my way to the end, causing the whole game to conclude on a deeply unsatisfying note for me.

In those moments, bored and frustrated, I started asking why I was bothering at all. There’s no grand mystery I’m uncovering by finding these secrets. I don’t get anything meaningful for collecting everything except a custom UI setting that can tell you information such as (and this is real) what anything Yoshi licks tastes like. Once I’ve found a discovery, there’s never any reason to revisit it again. And a lot of the discoveries themselves just…aren’t that interesting on their own. I am not super interested in running in repetitive patterns around a village of Jam Guys Hank 2s to make them play the game’s main theme for the umpteenth time.

The result of all this is that although I genuinely liked many of Yoshi and the Mysterious Book’s components, I’m a bit let down overall, and uninterested in revisiting it to finish all the discoveries I missed, or do much of its substantial post-game content. I just don’t have it in me. I don’t think the idea of a game fully focused on the sort of secret hunting I do as a side activity in other games is a bad one; I just think Yoshi and the Mysterious Book needed something more—whether a real plot, or a reason to revisit levels, or actual rewards, something!—to justify its more laborious sections. As it is, I’d rather go back to the risky, optional secret hunting of something like Mina the Hollower, even if it means I die 20 times along the way.