It’s sort of hard to express how deeply strange of a game Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is. Up until now, if you were playing a game, and it had Yoshi in it, and it was a side-scroller, then you were playing a platformer where you probably ate everything and threw shells and occasionally touched fuzzy to get dizzy. This game has those things. It’s Yoshi. It’s a side-scrolling platformer. You eat things. You throw shells… but it is absolutely not a platformer. It’s an immersive systemic puzzle game about discovery and interactions, possibly the first and only game of its kind, and Nintendo really didn’t sell it that way – they barely sold it at all. But they should have! Because this game rules, so long as you’re ok setting aside that it isn’t a “normal” Yoshi game.

Yoshi and the Mysterious Book starts off with Bowser Jr. and Kamek getting stuck in a magic sentient book, which then falls into the hands of a bunch of Yoshis. The book has chapters that depict a 2-page spread of a different type of biome full of weird little guys (mostly Established Weird Little Guys from the Yoshi Series) to investigate. You look for one of them that seems interesting, zoom in with the magnifying glass, and then it flips to that creature’s page. Zoom again and you get taken to a little level prominently featuring that weird little guy.

Yoshi is literally drawn into the pages of the book – represented as sort of watercolor sketches – and then you’re just left to your own devices. The goal isn’t “Run to the Right Until You Win”. The goal isn’t explained at all. All you’re told is “look, this level is full of sentient flower people, go learn about them”. So you just start interacting with them however you can. Ok great, you can eat them. Eating one scribbles a little note and scene onto the book where you did it, with a little cartoon of Yoshi devouring a helpless sentient flower person, with commentary about how Yoshi thinks they taste… then it’s right back to experimentation.

You can throw shells at them. You can ground pound them and they’ll sprout leaves. You can throw them on your back and run around with them. You can feed them various fruit. You can run past flowers in the environment and they bloom. You can make them bloom different colors. You can run over spores and have them infected by a deadly fungus. You can dry them out. You can water them. You can force them to work together to dig up radishes. You can feed them to horrible beasts (apart from Yoshi). And oh if you bring them to the big sentient flowers the big ones will bloom too! That was the goal! Congratulations you “finished” the level, but you can stay there however long you want finding new things to do with your weird little guys.

When you pop out of the book you’re shown a recap of all the things you learned, rewarding 1-3 stars based on how weird or complicated each thing was. Then, given all this newly recorded information, the book requires you provide a name for this creature. You can name it whatever you want, or use the Book’s suggestion, which is the canonical name. At that point you can flip to the last page of the section, try to guess the hint for the next thing you haven’t discovered, and hop back in to the level you were just at to start more experimentation, or you can head back to the chapter’s 2-page spread and see what your weird little guys are getting up to, typically something that reveals the next weird little guy to investigate.

There’s 6 chapters, with 6 guys per chapter, all completely unique and different little levels and goals and interactions and environmental hazards to roll around in, and inventive ways to do More Stuff with these weird little guys. The last Guy in each level is sort of a boss, but even with the boss encounters, you’re learning about ways you can interact and logging your findings.

The levels are really great, they’re inventive and complex and deep. They’re rarely repetitive, and they’re all however deep you want. You play them til you run out of ideas. And after you play them all, they just casually drop four more chapters on you. Then after you play those they drop TWO MORE challenge-mode chapters on you.

The depth of this game is absurd, it’s so full of stuff that I’m reasonably confident that despite beating every level I’m nowhere near what the game would consider “100%”, not for lack of trying. It’s disarming because it’s Yoshi, but the depth and creativity on display is amazing and refreshing considering that the past several Yoshi games have been just been shallow iterations. Can you honestly tell the difference between Yoshi’s Wooly World and Yoshi’s Crafted World? I certainly can’t! I think one has more cardboard than the other, but beyond that they’re completely forgettable. But this game? This was something else and it deserves recognition. I recommend it, maybe even highly recommend if you see a used copy or something.