It is always disappointing when a game you were looking forward to falls short. However, the disappointment is far greater when a game clearly shows you how it could have been excellent, yet chooses not to take that path. While there are many games that simply lack polish, the ones that offer a glimpse of brilliant potential only to leave it undeveloped are the ones that truly leave you feeling hollow. Beyond the midway point, Yoshi and the Mysterious Book delivered such immense fun that I found myself cheering out loud. Unfortunately, that joy quickly faded, and I was unable to recapture that same feeling afterward. The creative creature designs are truly impressive, and the joy of exploring the open-ended stages where they live and breathe is significant. Yet, the game's best ideas are left underutilized and discarded. As a result, the game feels less like an intriguing fantasy adventure and more like a tedious biology textbook where you are simply checking off a list of chores.
Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is an action-platformer with a firm emphasis on puzzle elements. Each stage is built around new and unique creatures, ranging from small to quite massive in size. Yoshi must interact with these creatures in various ways—swallowing them with his tongue, riding on their backs, or picking them up and throwing them—to gather information. This information is then recorded in a book under the name "Discoveries." These range from trivial facts, such as a flower-person's petals turning orange when they eat an apple, to practical information, like a terrifying monster with a scythe failing to notice the player if they hide in tall grass. Beyond the creatures, there are discovery elements related to the stages themselves. You can earn rewards by breaking solid objects, finding hidden Special Flowers, or simply reaching the final destination. Of course, reaching the destination doesn't force the stage to end; you can continue exploring if you wish. I really liked the fact that every time I entered a new stage, I had no idea what kind of bizarre experience awaited me.
The wide variety of creatures in the game is also an achievement worth celebrating. Dozens of unique creatures appear, all boasting charming designs. They serve as interesting mechanics, responsible for both the core structure of their respective stages and the gimmicks of stages they reappear in later. There are green creatures with bubble-wand heads, water-spouting creatures that can be used like jetpacks using water pressure, and balloon-gum-like critters that multiply endlessly when stepped on. There are countless others, such as ground-eating creatures you can ride, or large gliding creatures that bounce while spinning hula hoops. Furthermore, the game adds a fun layer of control by providing a minor customization feature that lets the player give every single one of these creatures their own name.
The stage where you first encounter each creature is designed to teach you its characteristics and use them to achieve specific goals. The traditional "move to the right" style of stage, common in previous Yoshi series entries, is only a small fraction of the experience. In an early stage featuring bees, you must retrieve stolen flowers, and in a place where a fisherman appears, you must catch the biggest fish in the pond. In this process, simply pondering where to go or attempting to figure out a specific creature's behavior patterns leads to a constant stream of new discoveries being recorded. Every time the screen fills with stamps announcing these achievements, it provides a significant sense of accomplishment and joy.
These constantly unfolding creative elements are the biggest reason why Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is fun to play. However, not every stage is equally polished. Finding the optimal way to travel while riding a seabird was a quite enjoyable challenge. On the other hand, a mission where you wander aimlessly through a Shy Guy village trying to get them all to play music at the same time felt like a very weak idea. In particular, stages where the physics engine interactions were poorly implemented were the worst segments, completely breaking the flow of the game. Controls like bouncing a top, surfing on waves atop a swaying pirate ship, or wall-jumping off bouncy bugs sometimes caused extreme frustration. These are painful mistakes rarely found in Nintendo platformers.
Once most of the discovery elements are filled, the appeal of the stages themselves drops significantly.
Another major issue is that the game's structure relies too heavily on discovery elements. Consequently, once you have finished most of the discoveries, the appeal of the stages themselves drops sharply. When the map is already filled with completed objectives, it is difficult to find intrinsic fun in replaying the stages. The game wants the player to revisit stages to find missed discoveries, but the process is not very enjoyable. This essentially means the game is little more than a light, one-off diversion. While it provides definite fun when achieving goals for the first time, there is no remaining motivation or appeal to revisit a cleared stage unless you have an obsession with 100% completion.
If the later stages had encouraged players to use the information discovered so far in more interesting and creative ways, this wouldn't have been a major problem. But this is precisely the biggest point of disappointment in Yoshi and the Mysterious Book. While various creatures reappear in the latter half of the game and require interaction with new research subjects, the methods are generally too simple and one-dimensional. The maps themselves are so small that there is no spatial room to engage in complex interactions with existing creatures while learning about new ones. About half of the stages have variant versions that focus on new interactions not found in the main game. These variant stages present quite interesting tasks, but unfortunately, the play time is so short that they end too quickly.
Despite the painful drawback of the game's shallow depth, the final stage of Chapter 6 is a significant exception. This segment is so excellent that the entire game should have been designed around this system, but sadly, that is not the case. If you want to experience this amazing moment for yourself, I recommend skipping this part of the text, as it may contain spoilers. Of course, due to Nintendo's pre-release embargo regulations, I cannot describe every specific detail.
In this stage, Yoshi can freely summon every creature he has met so far, one at a time. This system gives entirely new meaning to everything the player has done up to this point, and I was genuinely impressed enough to jump out of my seat. You realize that the actions you thought were merely "research" were actually a brilliant training process. You must solve every obstacle—climbing waterfalls, tunneling through mountains, and fighting enemies—using the knowledge you have accumulated. In a game that puts experimentation and discovery at its core, this is almost the only moment where the player can truly exercise their creativity and apply what they have learned to solve problems.
The polish of this stage is perfect. The moment the developers came up with this idea, they should have aligned the entire direction of the game with this system. I desperately wished that a stage requiring the comprehensive application of knowledge about the creatures met so far had been placed at the end of every chapter. Since this amazing system appeared about 8 hours into the gameplay, I expected that a full-fledged second act centered on this would finally begin. However, Yoshi and the Mysterious Book acts as if that system never existed in the first place. It then continues to introduce new creatures that it doesn't even utilize properly, returning to the same boring and flat flow as before.
The game's best system appears too late, and even then, it vanishes into thin air.
It is truly disheartening. While almost every stage was somewhat fun during the first playthrough, I began to get tired of the shallowness of the creature exploration as early as Chapter 3. I tried to hold onto hope, thinking I just hadn't reached the decisive turning point yet. But the essence of this game was, in the end, just simple repetitive labor. It is a structure that lines up cute gimmicks and has you mechanically fill out a checklist just to hear the goal-completion sound, for no particular reason. Because it showed me for a moment how much potential this charming concept had, only to take it away, none of the chapters or challenges that followed could soothe that bitterness. The player rarely gets the chance to create something creatively in this sandbox. You just have to keep digging in the dirt to find the marbles hidden beneath the sand.
Of course, there are pros. The number of discoveries to find is enormous, and some are really cleverly hidden or tricky to figure out. Therefore, a collector-type player who finds pleasure in the 100% completion rate itself might be deeply immersed in this game. Also, the built-in hint system, which uses "Tokens"—a currency you can obtain in abundance—to point out missed elements and locations, is excellent. Thanks to this, you don't have to suffer the frustration of wandering in the dark, not knowing which specific interaction you missed. The convenience tools to make the process of searching for new discoveries easier are well-equipped. It’s just that the process itself doesn't feel very rewarding.
The collectible I searched for with any degree of enthusiasm was the Special Flower. There are usually 3 to 6 in each stage. Special Flowers are hidden in the very classic Yoshi platformer style, such as reaching specific hard-to-access places or finding hidden areas. While Yoshi and the Mysterious Book shares quite a few elements with the existing series, such as egg-throwing or fluttering jumps, the actual gameplay experience is distinctly different from previous titles. It is very welcome that the developers are breaking the mold of the existing series and attempting new experiments in interesting directions. However, rather than repeating monotonous interactions like "Have I tried dropping this guy in the water?", the traditional method of using skill to find Special Flowers as in the past was much more satisfying and enjoyable.
The process of collecting Special Flowers was quite fun, but the reward for it was the most baffling unlockable I have ever seen in a video game. This reward doesn't open until after Chapter 6, about 8 hours into the play time (for the record, I finished all stages 5–6 hours after that), and what you can exchange 5 Special Flowers for is none other than a new UI design. This absurd customization option changes the information displayed on the game screen, ranging from chat logs of your accompanying book friend "Mysterious" to graphs analyzing the taste of everything Yoshi licks. It includes all sorts of miscellaneous features that measure variables completely useless to game progress, such as speed, water quality, and temperature.
This UI system doesn't explicitly hinder the game or become an eyesore, but it doesn't really help, either. Aside from the clock feature that speedrunners might like, the most useful thing I unlocked was a radar pointing to nearby Special Flowers. There is also a feature that displays Yoshi's remaining health (yes, though not explicitly stated in the game, Yoshi does have a health stat), but since Yoshi never collapses and gets a game over no matter how much damage he takes, it is effectively useless. Thanks to the free customization feature, you can fill the entire screen with meaningless junk information. The fact that they put so much sincerity into such a bizarre concept is strangely admirable. I cannot understand the developers' intentions at all, but I almost want to respect that strange persistence.
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