Yoshi and the Mysterious Book Review

Seven years passed between Yoshi's Crafted World and this one. Good-Feel has been Nintendo's dedicated Yoshi developer since Woolly World, and their track record across that decade is quietly excellent. Charming, accessible, visually inventive platformers that never try to be anything they are not. Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is the first entry in the series to launch on Switch 2, and it arrives as the most unusual thing the studio has made under the Yoshi banner.

The game released May 21, 2026, sits at 81 on Metacritic, and has drawn reviews describing it as weird, experimental, and unlike what most people expected walking in. All of that is accurate and none of it is a criticism.

The Setup

Bowser Jr. finds a mysterious living encyclopedia called Mr. E in Bowser's castle and spots a miraculous bird illustrated inside its pages. He sets off to find the real creature. Mr. E somehow ends up landing on the Yoshis' island, opens himself up, and invites the Yoshis to explore his pages and help him remember the creatures living inside them. That is the premise. It is light, it is charming, and it gets out of the way quickly so the game can do what it actually wants to do.

Each level is a chapter inside Mr. E's pages. Every chapter introduces different creatures, each with their own behaviour, personality, and abilities. Yoshi's job is to find them, interact with them, and figure out what each creature can do that changes how the level is traversed or completed.

How the Creature System Works

This is where the game separates itself from a standard Yoshi platformer. Eggs are still thrown. Flutter jumps still exist. But the central mechanic in most levels is understanding a specific creature well enough to use it correctly. Some creatures carry Yoshi across gaps. Some dig through terrain. Some float, some bounce, some interact with environmental objects in ways that open new paths.

The design language is built around experimentation rather than precision. You approach a new creature, try things, observe what happens, and build understanding through play rather than instruction. It is a slower, more curious loop than the action-forward platformers in Nintendo's broader catalogue, and it gives the game a distinctly gentle pace that feels intentional rather than underdeveloped.

Bowser Jr. appears across chapters in ways that complicate the exploration without turning the game adversarial. His presence adds a light narrative thread running through the creature discovery loop and gives younger players a recognisable character to track as the story progresses.

What Works and What Does Not

The visual design is the game's strongest achievement. Each chapter inside Mr. E creates a distinct habitat, and Good-Feel built the kind of world where every screen has something worth looking at. The creatures range from instantly loveable to genuinely strange, and the encyclopaedia framing gives the art direction an illustrated quality that makes the whole thing feel like a children's book brought to motion.

The Switch 2 hardware allows the environments to carry a level of detail and lighting that the previous entries could not manage, and the difference is visible. Crafted World was impressive for what the original Switch could do. Mysterious Book operates in a different visual range entirely.

Where the game earns its criticism is in structural repetition. The creature interaction loop is charming for the first half of the game and begins to feel formulaic by the back half. Each chapter follows a similar rhythm regardless of the creatures involved, and while the individual moments within that rhythm are consistently enjoyable, the scaffolding around them rarely surprises. Players who found Crafted World too thin will find similar limitations here.

The difficulty ceiling is low throughout. This is an E-rated Nintendo platformer built to be accessible to young children and parents playing alongside them, and that accessibility comes at the cost of meaningful challenge for experienced players. The Dark Knight difficulty option that Lego Batman just introduced does not exist here. Mysterious Book is what it is, and what it is will satisfy a specific audience completely while leaving another entirely underserved.

Who It Is For

Families with children in the five to ten age range will find this exactly right. The pacing, the visual warmth, the absence of punishment for mistakes, and the creature discovery loop all land well for that audience. Adults playing alone who want mechanical depth will bounce off it quickly.

As a Switch 2 launch window title it demonstrates the hardware's visual capabilities without demanding anything from the player beyond curiosity and patience. For a series built on those two qualities, that is exactly the right brief.

Available now exclusively on Nintendo Switch 2.