Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island remains one of my favourite games of all time, despite never owning a SNES and playing it all in disparate chunks at an Aunt’s house. Given the prestige of a mainline Mario platformer, it brimmed with creativity and subtle challenge, a member of the cohort of 32-bit Nintendo joints that would inform its game design for years to come.

But while the pair would team up again in a shared lead for two Yoshi’s Island sequels on DS, and Yoshi has made plenty of cameos in Mario’s bigger outings, only one of them would go on to churn out main event games moving forward. It’s a shame because, as much as I’ve enjoyed subsequent Yoshi titles, their relegation to B-game status has meant they’re always good, but only occasionally great.

That’s about how I feel towards Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, a Switch 2-exclusive new romp that sees the titular character delve into a magic, talking book named Mr. E in order to discover and catalogue the creatures within its pages. At first glance it clearly resembles many of the Yoshi platformers we’ve seen, but it very quickly becomes apparent that it strikes an entirely different cadence, and doesn’t so much shift the goal posts as redefines what a goal is. An admirable effort, one that recognises the importance of new games with fresh ideas, but that doesn’t quite come together by its closing chapters.

Yoshi and the Mysterious Book’s unconventional 2D platformer design begins with the fact that there is zero danger. No health, no lives, almost no possible fail states. And the goal of each stage is not to simply get to the end, defeat enemies or find all of a collectible. The goal is only ever to do a specific something, and that something is always different and never explicitly spelled out. It all comes back to the idea of meeting and figuring out all of the creatures in this book, every level focusing on a single species that you must poke, prod and play with until you can find the hidden interaction or consequence that summons a portal back out of the page.

It is, essentially, a game of science. Of observing a particular creature – many of which are made famous by prior Yoshi games – deducing its unique characteristics, and then attempting to manipulate them for your own gain. While Yoshi still rocks his usual moves like swallowing critters to turn them into eggs or coming out of a flutter jump into a ferocious ground pound, a new tail flick move works as a context-sensitive action that’ll usually pop the creature onto Yoshi’s back but may interact with them in other ways.

It could be that, for example, an umbrella-shaped bird allows you to float through the air, or a hammer plant with a huge, flowery maw can either be slammed down onto things or used to scoop aquatic prey out of the water. Sometimes Yoshi gets a taste of his own medicine and the creature is an enormous fish that swallows you whole but in turn allows for underwater exploration or being spat out across large distances. There are creatures that make music, ones that merge with or absorb other creatures, a few that will actively hunt Yoshi. In fact, folks eating folks is a pretty prevalent theme here, and it’s approached with the same matter-of-factness you’d find in a nature documentary, which is kind of refreshing for a cutesy Nintendo joint.

As you “finish” each stage and earn stars for each potential interaction found within, you’ll slowly unlock more pages of the book representing new areas with their own ecosystems and biology. The way the game doles out progression is quite generous, and I’d almost unlocked all of the first part of the game – there’s more than it initially lets on, but I’ll leave that to ~~mystery~~ Mr. E – before I’d even cleared the first “world,” so there’s not a ton of pressure to scour every corner for every last, possible discovery.

As a child I loved reading books about dinosaurs and birds, and so this format would have really spoken to a younger me – and I hope it does the same for the current crop of burgeoning players. These games often broach generations by offering surface level fun for kids while hiding added depth for older fans, but this is the first Nintendo game in a while where I’ve thought maybe I’m too old for this.

And it’s not that it’s too childish, or that there isn’t some of that hidden challenge aimed at completionists, it’s that the concepts at the centre of it hinge on a style of “play” that is inherently child-like. It’s the difference between how I interacted with LEGO at five years old vs how I do now. As impressive as the sheer variety of different creature types and unique interactions is, there’s only so much I can get out of pottering around and throwing things at other things until they react. And, a fairly healthy post-ish-game aside, that’s really what it boils down to.

Being able to name each and every creature you discover, though, and Mr. E being forced to call them by that name going forward, even if they’re already completely established in Yoshi videogame history? Stupendously redeeming feature.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2 | Review copy supplied by Nintendo

Yoshi and the Mysterious Book probably won't delight long-term Yoshi fans with its simple, unchallenging campaign, but younger players with an open mind for playful discovery should get a kick out of building their own encyclopedia of strange and wonderful creatures.