Nintendo keeps finding new ways to reinvent platformers

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.

What makes it work is the sheer amount of weird, playful creatures you’ll encounter. Early on, they’re relatively simple; toads that will sing a tune when you hop on them, or a frog that is somehow also a bubble wand. There are giant fish, hula-hooping birds, and creatures that have evolved to mimic everything from an umbrella to a skateboard. At one point you meet what looks like a version of Kirby made out of bubblegum. The wildlife is diverse, but every creature shares two things in common: They are absolutely adorable and their abilities all have multiple uses, many of which are not immediately obvious. The only way to figure things out is to try things and see what happens.

Each level is its own sandbox, and the act of progressing through the game is pure play. There are some specific challenges you can complete, but mostly the game is about learning what you can do by going out and doing it. And because there’s no real failure state, there’s rarely a reason not to try something. Those moments of discovery — whether it was opening a new path or seeing Yoshi turn red after eating a hot pepper — never failed to make me smile.

This also means that Mysterious Book is comparatively easier than, say, Super Mario Bros. Wonder. You can’t die, the bosses aren’t especially tough, and I’ve yet to find a platforming sequence that took me more than a few tries. But the game also approaches challenge in a different way. It’s not about how hard it is to get from point A to point B. Instead, it’s about being creative and finding ways to uncover the game’s many secrets. Several times I found myself stumped about what else I could do. In a traditional Super Mario game, usually my only solution would be to replay a difficult sequence over and over again until I finally got it right. But in Mysterious Book, the solution instead is to experiment: make Yoshi eat new things, or toss a boomerang at a strange plant, and watch what unfolds. Usually it’s something that’s both charming and helps me progress.

My only real complaint with the game is that it tacks on a storyline featuring Bowser Jr. and Kamek, which feels like a cheap attempt at synergy with the Super Mario Galaxy Movie. Yoshi and the Mysterious Book doesn’t need that. Like the original Yoshi’s Island on the SNES, it’s a game that takes the traditional Super Mario formula as its starting point, but reimagines it into something that ultimately feels completely different. Even in a genre that has been around for decades, Nintendo somehow keeps finding ways to surprise.

_{Yoshi and the Mysterious Book launches on the Switch 2 on May 21st.}