00:00Perhaps because he's so cute and marketable, Yoshi's adventures have been designed for
00:04a younger and younger audience for the last several years.
00:072006's Yoshi's Island DS was not out of step with the difficulty of a mainline Mario
00:12game, but since then the challenge of mainline Yoshi games has been slowly softened to target
00:17younger audiences.
00:19With Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, Nintendo has made the gameplay even more gentle for
00:23novices, but what it lacks in difficulty it mostly makes up for in creativity and a playful
00:29gimmick built around discovery and exploration.
00:45Yoshi and the Mysterious Book isn't a typical platformer.
00:48You don't move left to right to reach a finish line.
00:51Yoshi can't die and there aren't enemies to overcome in a traditional sense.
00:56Instead, the stages are little biospheres teeming with natural flora and fauna.
01:00Rather than fight them, you're there to document them.
01:03Yoshi is less of an adventure this time around and more of a research assistant.
01:08You're conducting research inside the pages of Mr. Encyclopedia, a conscious compendium
01:13of all life on a remote, unnamed island.
01:16The Yoshis volunteer to jump into the pages of the books and document their findings, putting
01:20each of the creatures through their paces.
01:22That usually includes documenting how they taste, what happens if you throw them, how
01:27they interact with the environment, and even how they interact with each other.
01:30This transforms stages into little standalone playgrounds where you experiment with a new
01:35creature and see what it can do.
01:37The play is about the discovery itself, as you observe different reactions and the game
01:42gently guides you to try new things.
01:44It's surprising how well this works.
01:47Instead of reaching a goal line, the stages conclude when you make some predefined, especially
01:52significant discovery.
01:57For a set of flowers called Crazy Daisies, for example, it's using them to grow large
02:02flower buds.
02:03For Shy Guys, it's finding all of their hiding spots.
02:06For Castorway, a creature with a fishing pole, it's catching a huge lunker of a fish lurking
02:11in the water below.
02:12I wasn't sure how well the game would approach guiding you to your goals when no two goals
02:17are exactly the same, but it works remarkably well.
02:21You can always ask Mr. E for a hint, but I rarely needed to.
02:24The rhythms of the stages and cascading discoveries often led me to the right conclusion.
02:35Years of Mario platformers, of which Yoshi owes its lineage, makes the general controls
02:40feel natural and fluid.
02:41You can run, jump, swallow things with your sticky tongue, and throw eggs using the left
02:47stick for aiming.
02:49But Yoshi in the Mysterious Book also gets a delightful amount of variety out of both
02:53its differentiated goals and its myriad of strange creatures.
02:57A snurfboard creature functions like a surfboard, letting you ride on it and do tricks.
03:01Meanwhile, a slug-a-rang, a bug shaped like boomerang, lets you toss it away as a projectile
03:07to mow down grass and trim trees, allowing you to make new discoveries.
03:11Each world has at least one creature like these two examples, and their inclusion mixes up
03:16the gameplay in some new and surprising way, which helps maintain a brisk pace of variety.
03:22As you get deeper into the game, you start to find creatures that interact with each other,
03:26earlier ones you had already discovered.
03:28You can go back and spend coins to buy hints for interactions you may have missed in previous
03:32areas if you want to see them all.
03:34I should say here, by the way, that each of these creatures can be named however you wish.
03:39You're the archaeologist discovering them, so Mr. E lets you name them.
03:43I didn't use this functionality much, preferring to hear their canonical names per Mr. E's
03:48suggestion.
03:48But it's a cute touch that I'm sure kids will enjoy.
04:00The story is light to the point of being almost non-existent.
04:04Somehow Bowser Jr. and Kamek have found themselves in the titular book as well and they're searching
04:09for a rare species.
04:11You restore the pages of the book to unlock new areas and naturally that means you are
04:15on their tail, but you aren't given any particular motivation otherwise.
04:20That said, the main story culminates in a plot twist of sorts that is so bizarre and left
04:25field that you really need to see it to believe it.
04:28The story was too barebones to evoke a strong emotional reaction from me, but I was still
04:34amused that such a cute game had such a dark idea lurking inside it.
04:45Speaking of seeing and believing, the visual style and mysterious book is gorgeous.
04:51Inside the book, the whole game has a visual layer that makes it look like illustrations
04:55on a page, with a colored pencil aesthetic and skipped frames to accent the effect.
05:00Especially when played in TV mode, Yoshi is full of expressive reactions to everything
05:06he sees, and in particular, everything he tastes.
05:11These playful cartoon expressions help to even further accentuate its appeal for younger
05:16players.
05:16The clear targeting of younger gamers has its drawbacks though.
05:20Most notably, while this is a game that seems aimed at early or pre-readers, it's absolutely
05:25chock full of text to read, and there is no voice acting or spoken dialogue to make the
05:30experience more accessible to the audience that will likely be enjoying the game most.
05:34Mr. E speaks in a Simlish-like vocalizing, but the dialogue has to be read.
05:40Discoveries pop up as text as well.
05:42The hint system is all text too.
05:44A younger player without strong reading skills might be able to play with the systems and
05:48make discoveries, but it may be hard for them to progress without someone around to interpret
05:53the text for them.
05:54For older players, there is a little more complexity hidden behind the first ending.
05:59It's actually one of the coolest features the game has to offer, which makes it strange
06:04to rope it behind completion.
06:06Once you finish the main story, you open up a modular UI with exploration tools that can
06:11be bought in exchange for the smiley flowers you've been gathering throughout your journey,
06:15and then mapped to a grid overlay.
06:17These tools are unlocked in a particular order, so you can't just select the ones you want,
06:22but a few of them include a bioscanner to track nearby creatures, thermometers to track temperature,
06:28and more.
06:28There's even a life bar for Yoshi, which confusingly doesn't seem to do anything since
06:33you can't die.
06:34But when Yoshi gets low enough in health, he visibly reacts.
06:38Presumably this system was running under the hood the whole time, but I never noticed
06:41until unlocking the tool.
06:43These tools can be applied to extra biomes that open up after the first ending as well.
06:48That extends the adventure into new areas with new creatures, as well as allowing you to
06:53discover how those creatures and your new exploration tools interact with all the ones
06:57you've already found.
06:59How much mileage you get out of those extra stages, and in fact the entire game, relies
07:03largely on your level of curiosity.
07:09Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is fundamentally a game about poking and prodding at the world,
07:15in seeing what happens.
07:16It won't test your precision platforming skills, but it serves as a gentle introduction
07:21for novices and an experiment for even experienced gamers to see an audacious expanded idea of what
07:27a platformer can be.
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