In most platforming games, you’re fighting against the world around you. You’re trying to beat a level, nail a seemingly impossible series of jumps, or defeat a powerful boss. But even though Yoshi and the Mysterious Book uses familiar gameplay — you traverse the world by jumping, climbing, and, uh, eating — it reframes your goal to focus on exploration instead of competition. And in doing so it reimagines the classic side-scrolling platformer as something that feels refreshingly new: laid-back, playful, and bursting with ideas.
The new Yoshi game looks like a storybook, and that’s because it takes place inside of one. Early on you meet a sentient book named Mr. E who has a slight memory problem: He can’t remember much of what exists on his pages. So, as Yoshi, your goal is to venture inside his pages and learn about each creature that dwells within. It’s sort of like a Mushroom Kingdom version of a zoological study. Right away the game’s structure feels distinct from other Mario games. You aren’t going through a series of levels that need to be beaten, but rather venturing into a series of habitats that have to be explored. In each chapter, you run a magnifying glass over a moving image in search of creatures. Once you find one, you hop into their habitat to discover more.
While the setup is unique, at its most basic, Mysterious Book is a traditional side-scrolling platformer. Yoshi has his typical array of abilities: He can jump, hang in the air for extended periods, and use his long tongue to gobble up creatures and turn them into eggs, which he can then use as projectiles. He also has a tail flick move, which lets creatures ride on Yoshi’s back. What’s different is what the game wants you to do with those abilities. The goal in each level isn’t to reach the end or to defeat enemies, it’s to collect as much information about a particular creature as possible. And you do that by messing around and seeing what happens. You might learn a new fact by tasting a bug, or by jumping on it, or carrying it on your back.
