Yoshi and the Mysterious Book previews made the rounds yesterday, and a new trailer emerged today. All the new looks showcase a very different kind of Yoshi game; gone are Yoshi’s fighting days as instead he’s cataloguing mystical creatures, seemingly by tormenting them to see how they’ll react. It’s more leisurely, with Yoshi unable to die to hazards and no time limit on stages.
And it’s also weirder, because you can apparently call Shy Guys “Hanks” if you want…but just for this game.
Instead of escorting babies or rescuing eggs, Yoshi and the Mysterious Book’s titular dinosaur is trying to fill out a magical encyclopedia of weird little guys. He zaps himself into the book, finds a guy, messes around with it for a while to see what all it can do and how it interacts with the environment, records it, and repeats. There are stage hazards like sharp bees or watermelon monsters that spit seeds at you, but they just briefly hinder you rather than actively kill you. Some of these little guys are familiar from past Yoshi games, like Goonies (cute seagulls) and Blargg (big lava monster), but a number of others appear to be brand new, like a weird soapy, noodly frog thing and a snail that can unravel into a vertical springboard.
Different as this sounds from past Yoshi games, after watching some footage of it, I actually think Yoshi and the Mysterious Book looks…like a Yoshi game. He’s basically doing the same stuff as before. He’s jumping on and over things, finding hidden secrets, chucking eggs, eating, just without any penalties for messing any of that up. Yoshi can meander. Yoshi can waste time! If anything, this is just a welcome tonal tweak that can help Yoshi stand out from Nintendo’s numerous other characters who have participated in side-scrolling platformers. Which is…almost all of them at this point. It’s fine if we redefine Yoshi games as the softer ones, and if they’re largely focused on poking at the shrubbery, I guess. If that makes them more for kids than adults, as some folks are suggesting, so be it.
My favorite bit about Yoshi and the Mysterious Book so far is the ability to name the little guys you run into. The magical encyclopedia will suggest each creature’s proper name for you, but you’re free to just call them whatever you want. This delightfully resulted in Restart.run‘s previewer referring to a Shy Guy as “Hank,” which prompts the whole rest of the game to call all Shy Guys “Hanks” instead. This was made even funnier by the fact that apparently the Nintendo rep at the demo station repeatedly told the previewer that this mechanic was only in Yoshi and the Mysterious Book every time “Hank” came up. Shy Guys are not Hanks anywhere except in that particular game session. Do not, under any circumstances, refer to Shy Guys as Hanks going forward for all eternity (please do it).
Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is out on May 21 for Nintendo Switch 2, starring the green dinosaur Yoshi, Mr. E the giant talking encyclopedia, a flower that looks like it’s going to Undertale me any second, and Hank.
