I played ‘Yoshi and the Mysterious Book’ and felt like a kid again

After seeing The Super Mario Galaxy movie (stinky! not good!), I could use a great piece of media to hook up with Yoshi right now. It’s lucky timing then, that Yoshi and the Mysterious Book it’s around the corner.

Nintendo’s next Switch 2-exclusive (and, at this point, one of the only games announced for the Switch 2 with a release date) is coming out on May 21st, and I got to play a few hours of it at a preview event in NYC. While I’m still not entirely sure that this lightweight, kid-friendly adventure is what I’m looking for in a Yoshi game, it has a really neat take on sandbox experimentation and a great visual style.

To put it simply, if you like to throw things at other things just to see what happens – or if you need a new game that your little ones can play without getting frustrated – then go for it. Yoshi and the Mysterious Book it should be on your radar.

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Yoshi and the Mysterious Book just wanna check, dude

I’ll admit that before I got my hands on it, I had a hard time grasping the core concept of Yoshi’s first star-studded adventure since 2019.

The Mysterious Book it simultaneously feels like there’s a lot going on when you’re bouncing around one of its many vibrant, scripted worlds. But on a larger level, it’s really a game about doing things until you don’t want to do things anymore, without time pressure (or any other kind of pressure) to pressure the player.

Its premise finds a group of colorful dinosaurs in Yoshi hanging out with a book, well, a mystery named Mr. E. He’s a cool, leathery, moustached encyclopedia, but he also seems to have dumped the contents of his pages, and it’s up to Yoshi to jump inside the book and find as much information as possible about the writings of the amazing creatures.

Each chapter is a tableau with great pictures of various creatures hanging out in their natural habitats, and zooming in on a creature will enter a level based around it.

Once you level up, the idea is just to get as many mysterious system interactions between the creatures and their environment as possible, mostly by trying to eat them (as Yoshi tends to do) or by putting them in Yoshi’s tree and throwing them at animals or different objects. Finding different types of interactions rewards the player with stars, which can be used to unlock additional levels.

For example, the first level I played involved multi-colored flowers. When I tried to eat it, I got starstruck by finding out that you can turn them into eggs. As I carried one on my back and passed through a patch of grass, a field of flowers of the same color as the one I had placed on my back sprouted, giving me another star. The rest of the level focused on growing flowers in certain areas to solve puzzles, and within a few minutes, I had collected a bunch of stars and could travel whenever I wanted.

The Mysterious BookFlow sounds basic and frankly boring when written, but a few things keep it from feeling that way in practice.

First, simply moving Yoshi around these 2D side-scrolling sandboxes is a joy thanks to the sharp platforming and egg-throwing mechanics that have worked for 30 years. In addition, The Mysterious Book has a jaw-dropping art style that evokes stop-motion animation in a 2D setting.

Some cartoons deliberately have a low number of frames to create that effect, and between that and the outstanding character and natural art shown, The Mysterious Book it has the best look of any Yoshi game ever.

You really need to see this move to understand how good it is.
Credit: Nintendo

It also helps that the levels are progressively more involved as they go. One of my favorites involved some sort of bug that, for lack of a better word, plucked various objects from the body to attack Yoshi. The level was full of watermelons, which could land a bug to turn into a flying seed-spitting gun, but luckily, Yoshi was able to. again quick fire seeds by eating one.

After a while, the main objective of the level was to quickly eat the watermelons before the bugs got to them, and when they got to the next one, the game briefly turned into a little side-scrolling shootout between Yoshi and a flying watermelon.

Of course, there were a lot of other bad things going on in the area, so if I wanted to, I could ignore the watermelon bugs and just head to other things to collect stars.

Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is a very safe place

I’m really into the idea of ​​2D sandboxes where everything can interact with everything else, too Yoshi and the Mysterious Book it seems to be well formed from that point of view. Mine alone possible The hangup with me after the demo I played is that, as the demo worker told me, Yoshi can’t take damage or die in this game. When the watermelon bugs spit seeds at Yoshi, the worst thing that can happen is that the player gets a little pissed off.

This looks like a good time! I wish I was doing this instead of typing words into a computer.
Credit: Nintendo

I’m not dense enough to misunderstand the target audience The Mysterious Book – new players.

I think kids will enjoy this Yoshi article even more than mine

This upcoming title pushes kids forward in a way that not all Nintendo games do, and that’s generally a good thing. A simple game that’s perfect for new programmers who just want to run around and try things out.

I think it’s amazing that Nintendo produces quality software that can be enjoyed by both young and old gamers, especially in a world where it seems like every other game marketed to children is one of a kind Roblox a nightmare. Having said that, he removed anywhere sense of danger from The Mysterious Book it makes parts of the demo feel pointless and not very exciting.

However, I am open to the possibility that over the course of a full game, I will be able to settle down Yoshi and the Mysterious BookClearly and, at times, a delightfully flawless rhythm. We will get together next month.

Yoshi and the Mysterious Book launches exclusively on Nintendo Switch 2 on May 21. It’s available for pre-order now from Nintendo. and Amazon for $69.99.