Yoshi and the Mysterious Book Review – Nintendo Switch 2

With Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, the beloved green dinosaur leaps off the screen – fresh from a charming appearance in the Super Mario Galaxy movie – and straight into the most delightful digital toybox imaginable.

Good-Feel, the development studio famous for creating wonderfully cosy and craft-themed Nintendo adventures like Yoshi’s Woolly World and Kirby’s Epic Yarn, has crafted a marvellous new title, continuing their highly tactile aesthetic with this new Nintendo Switch 2 title.

Set within the crinkling pages of a sentient encyclopaedia, the game takes a brilliantly wacky premise – transforming it into a supreme visual showcase for Nintendo’s latest console, thrusting players into a whimsical playground where studying quirky habitats and the sheer thrill of discovery take the lead over traditional, twitchy platforming gameplay.

Arriving in Yoshi’s papercraft universe feels like opening a spectacular pop-up book, where an ever-changing world presents a breathtaking landscape of shifting mechanisms, hand-sketched backdrops, and beautifully textured fabrics. Nintendo has leveraged the Switch 2’s capabilities – gorgeous in both handheld and docked modes – to ensure every single frame operates as a vibrant, glittering work of art.

Story

The adventure kicks off when a talking, slightly flustered book named Mr. E (for Encyclopedia, naturally) tumbles onto the Yoshis’ island during a sudden storm. His precious pages have blown away in the wind, leaving him entirely devoid of the vast knowledge he once held.

To help their strange new friend, the Yoshis dive headfirst into his remaining chapters to catalogue a vast array of peculiar creatures. The journey functions as a heartwarming rescue mission filled with gentle surprises throughout.

Players slowly uncover the brilliant magic behind the book and its gloriously diverse biomes, as the developers have carefully constructed a setting that feels incredibly comforting. The storytelling relies heavily on visual observation – albeit quite a lot of reading, it would have been amazing for at least the cinematics to be voiced for younger players – inviting players to scrutinise the papercraft architecture and piece together the history of Mr. E’s world.

The writing remains wonderfully peppy throughout the campaign. The charming relationship between Yoshi and the eclectic cast of newly discovered creatures provides a vital, grounded anchor to the fantastical setting. This emotional core makes the final revelations feel genuinely earned, and you leave with a massive grin.

Gameplay

On its surface, Yoshi and the Mysterious Book might look like a simple, stress-free side-scroller with no traditional fail states.

Don’t let its bright, ‘edutainment’ veneer fool you  – just as Nintendo breathed a new lease of life into open-world gaming with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, this title quietly executes a brilliant revolution of its own. It is an incredibly innovative and daring piece of game design that pushes boundaries even further than the brilliant Super Mario Bros. Wonder in terms of sheer, unadulterated imagination.

The core of the experience revolves around filling out Mr. E’s scattered pages by interacting with the local flora and fauna. Finding a new animal allows you to borrow its unique traits to solve environmental puzzles, but the real magic lies in how completely the game rewards boundless curiosity, constantly coaxes you into asking, “What if?” What if I go back and sprout every single closed flower in this meadow? What if I pick up this strange little creature and carry it all the way up to this high ledge?

Every single time you follow a whimsical hunch, the game totally meets you there, flooding the playtime with joy as you realise your random experiment was entirely intended by design. It forces you to use your brain in a thoroughly refreshing, lateral way, making the entire journey an addictive masterclass in environmental problem-solving.

Each discovery is quickly annotated on the screen – or rather, the page – exactly where you’ve found it, once again giving immediate feedback loops to each learning, which can become quite complicated for the trickier puzzles.

Thankfully, Mr. E is on hand to give a clue with a quick tap of the ‘L’ button, stopping short of hand-holding but preventing barriers to progress – only a handful of discoveries allow access to the next stage, but completionists are also very much rewarded, as with previous Yoshi titles, as each chapter’s cover page carefully documents all of your findings, as well as hints to how many remain.

Adding to this magic is the wonderfully personal cataloguing process. Once you document a creature, you are allowed to give it a custom name – a small design touch which means that by the time the credits roll, your completed encyclopaedia is entirely unique to your journey.

My eight-year-old daughter immediately fell in love with giving them silly titles, while my four-year-old son was simply mesmerised by seeing our custom-named papercraft animals reacting to Yoshi’s movements on screen. It is a brilliant loop that maintains its magic flawlessly across the entire runtime – the only thing that would have elevated things was a two-player or assist mode.

Despite being able to choose from a menagerie of colourful Yoshis for each level – definitely a game which rewards repeat run-throughs to uncover a stage’s secrets – the lack of a shared gameplay experience made things a bit challenging when looking for the more obscure solutions…of which there are many, but rarely to the point of frustration.

Audio

The audio design is a spectacularly cheerful triumph for the new console. Good-Feel has expertly utilised the hardware to deliver an auditory experience that feels genuinely magical. The ambient soundscape provides a dense, comforting layer of environmental noise, from the satisfying, heavy rustle of turning pages to the distinctly upbeat melodies associated with the distinct worlds on show.

In the midst of puzzle-solving, the audio mixing allows you to track hidden collectables across the environments with absolute precision. You can distinctly hear the rapid, papery skittering of an unseen creature hiding in the foliage. This clarity provides a fantastic advantage during the most elaborate, secret-stuffed exploration sequences.

The musical score delivers a stunning blend of light, acoustic instruments and catchy, hummable tunes. It successfully builds a sense of overwhelming joy during the game’s more expansive set pieces, ensuring the auditory experience matches the visual splendour perfectly.

Performance

On the Nintendo Switch 2, the title operates as an absolute technical marvel. The engine features dynamic shadows and accurate reflections that add a massive amount of visual depth to the handcrafted environments. The game flawlessly maintains a wonderfully smooth performance even when the screen is filled with chaotic physics interactions and exploding confetti.

To sell the magnificent illusion of a living book, the developers have applied a selective, lower frame rate to character animations, most notably when Yoshi leaps, and his feet become a pedalling blur – thank the Spider-Verse movies for changing media forever!

This artistic choice perfectly mimics traditional animation techniques and looks breathtaking in motion. The overall game performance remains impeccably smooth, ensuring the highly stylised animations never interfere with the snappy responsiveness of the Joycons.

Verdict

Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is a phenomenal achievement in joyful game design. It successfully blends a relaxing, non-linear narrative with incredibly clever, discovery-focused mechanics. The final result is a premium adventure that is wonderfully charming from the first page to the last.

Years from now, I have little doubt that ripples of its inventive design philosophy will be seen across the industry, and Nintendo deserves immense praise for delivering a true platforming masterpiece brimming with heart and originality – a great addition to the Switch 2 for the little dinosaur(s) that could!