Magical books often spell trouble, whether it’s inviting you in to experience the world-ending story within its pages (and to ride on the back of a dog-like luckdragon), or turning you into puppets at the behest of your daughter and aggressively trying to save your marriage. But magic is pretty normal in the lands of Mario, Peach and Yoshi, so maybe this Mister Encyclopedia is going to be a bit more wholesome?
Yoshi and the Mysterious Book starts with the multicoloured Yoshi family happening across Mister Encyclopedia – Please, call him Mr. E, and Britannica was his father. He’s been plucked from his comfortable and presumably slightly dusty life and is now right out in the wilds with a case of book amnesia. There’s lots of stuff within his pages, but what does it all mean? That’s where the Yoshis come in for a little bit of tongue-grabbing, egg-flinging, flutter-jumping investigative work.
Mr. E’s pages don’t contain regular drawings, but moving ones that will change as you progress. You have to use a strange magnifying glass to scope out the various interesting things on a page, and once you’ve found a particularly lively-looking creature or interesting object, you are then absorbed into the pencil-drawn, papery world. It’s honestly a fairly subtle effect, especially when viewing the game in screenshots and on YouTube, but once you spot the pencil aesthetic, it’s another lovely artsy twist for the series, calling back to the original Yoshi’s Island, but in much, much higher fidelity.
The levels in Yoshi and the Mysterious Book are less about start-to-finish platforming and much more about discovery. What happens when Yoshi eats them? Can they ride on Yoshi’s back? What about clonking them on the head with an egg (usually made from another one of them)? And how about feeding them a spicy pepper? There is a climactic moment to each level, but it’s just as much about trying out everything you can come up with and seeing what happens.
It leads to discoveries like how the flower-headed creatures cause flowers to bloom, how the hoop-headed frog will just blurp out soap bubbles if you run with them on your back, which Yoshi can hop between to reach higher places, and how frogs with a leaf on their head are both very bouncy and musical. But how can you make them more bouncy? That’s a mini conundrum.
After completing a stage, you return to the “real” world and Mr. E recounts all of the discoveries you’ve made in that level, filling in his pages with more little diagrams. After the first play, you then get the opportunity to name the creature (even if it’s a familiar foe like the Shy Guys), with some suitably sensitive word filters for a children’s game in effect. There’s always plenty more to discover after the first encounter, though, and Mr. E’s pages can offer you a hint or two for the next thing you might like to try out.
The main drawing for a particular chapter will now have changed and animated, the creatures wandering around, others waking up, and this giving you new options for more creatures to investigate within their own levels. There’s a good bit of crossover for new discoveries to reveal themselves, such as when chilly peppers appear in a later level, and you want to see what happens when feeding them to the flower people.
There is a little more than meets the eye to the tale that will unfold within Mr. E’s pages, but in general, there’s very little peril as you play, making this a far more relaxed experience than the already fairly light and easy-going platforming of the last few Yoshi games.
I do wonder, though, if it’s the right time for Yoshi and the Mysterious Book to join the Switch 2‘s library. Arriving within the first year of the console means that it’s still pretty early on in terms of sales and audience, and the higher price of this generation might mean that it’s in the hands of fewer children at this point as well.
And it’s those young minds where Yoshi and the Mysterious Book will have the greatest impact. I really like the change of direction from Yoshi’s Crafted World, which, as charming as its art direction and level-flipping was, was a collectathon platformer at its heart. Mysterious Book, however, has a more distinctive tone to its explorative platforming, which will undoubtedly spark more curiosity within younger players when it launches next month.
