Eat Your Friends, Fill The Book: Yoshi’s Brand New Switch 2 Odyssey
Yoshi embarks on a brand-new adventure on a completely different scale, getting sucked right into a living encyclopedia where the very ground beneath your feet reacts to your presence. The atmosphere hits you instantly with an incredible art style that blends brilliantly rendered cutscenes with playful in-game character interactions that make the world feel alive. This isn’t a traditional, paint-by-numbers platformer; it is a bizarre, experimental physics playground where everything is driven by curiosity and absolute discovery. You are dropped straight into the pages of Mr E with zero hand-holding, left to poke at the environment just to see what happens.
QUICK NAV: [Specs] [Gameplay] [Performance] [Settings]
Yoshi and the Mysterious Book Nintendo Switch 2 Review
- Developer: Good-Feel
- Publisher: Nintendo
- Official Store Page: Nintendo eShop UK
- Download Size: 19.5GB download size.
- Account System: You can choose to play with any account in your Nintendo Switch 2.
- Amiibo Support: Full Amiibo support included and gives rewards.
- Save System: You can save whenever you want.
Yoshi and the Mysterious Book Nintendo Switch 2 Review
The goal here is entirely about discovering objectives without knowing them beforehand, forcing you to try wild things just to see how the world twists around you. You are befriending a talking book named Mr E who handles your level select and stores all your data, and as you explore, you use a magnifying glass to examine pages and uncover secrets about the inhabitants. There are 8 different coloured Yoshis to play as, and you can meet and literally eat friendly characters (because why not) to carry them on your back. Whichever friend you hitch a ride with changes the colour of the blooming flowers you walk past, which completely alters the mechanics and creatures you encounter. Levels feel incredibly small at first but then grow and grow with massive verticality, challenging you to collect hidden coins and flowers across six distinct story chapters.
The game keeps throwing clever loops at you, like using bubbles as platforms or dealing with fluff that sticks to rocks to break them or soak up water. There are even music-based levels where jumping on specific people causes a noise to come out, putting a cool twist on standard progression. Aiming and shooting eggs is mapped entirely to the right stick, and you make them by eating people and pooping them out to have them follow you. When you first start, it doesn’t tell you a lot, and you will just start triggering text on the screen when you clear a cave or turn flowers a certain colour. It can be confusing when you don’t know how the mechanics work or how to 4-star a level, like dealing with a crap load of bees that chase you until you bloom flowers to attract them away from you, but finding these new movements is a refreshing change of pace.
Yoshi and the Mysterious Book Nintendo Switch 2 Review: Performance & Fidelity
- Visual Presentation: Awesome graphics with an art style that really is incredible, though it can get in the way, making some platforms hard to judge or know if you can use them.
- Cutscenes & Animation: Brilliant rendered cutscenes, mixed with in-game cutscenes and in-game character interactions.
- Environmental Reactive Details: A lot of detail is in the game; playing in the mud makes you and the eggs dirty, and water cleans you off, for example, but the physics of everything is what sets the bar high.
Settings, Customisation & Control Details
- Controller Options: Three controller types are available to choose from.
- Egg Toss Settings: Egg toss behaviour can be set to either patient or hasty.
- Rumble Customisation: Rumble settings can be adjusted to default, gentle, or switched completely off.
- Menu Accessibility: You can’t actually view the settings until you get into the gameplay.
- Character Naming: Any characters you befriend except Mr E can be manually renamed by yourself.
Related Gert Lush Gaming Reviews
- 007 First Light PS5 Review: This Is Exactly How You Build A James Bond Origin Story
- Tides Of Tomorrow Review: A Single-Player Masterstroke Built On The Ghosts Of Other Gamers
- \’83 Steam Review: Hardcore Cold War Combat or a Clunky Mess?
Yoshi and the Mysterious Book Nintendo Switch 2 Review:
Summary
What Makes Yoshi And The Mysterious Book Worth Playing?
The graphics are absolutely awesome, delivering a stunning art style full of incredible rendered cutscenes and character interactions that immediately look brilliant. There is an immense amount of detail packed into the world, like the way running through mud gets Yoshi and his eggs completely dirty until you dive into water to clean off. The level design is never lacking, throwing clever ideas at you constantly, from musical levels where jumping on people makes noises to using bubbles as platforms or absorbing water with fluff. It is incredibly fun to watch the book fill up with life as you discover creatures, eat friendlies to change flower colours on your back, and use the magnifying glass to examine pages. It is a completely refreshing take on the genre that rewards experimentation, features full Amiibo support, lets you play as 8 different Yoshis, and lets you rename any companion you befriend.
The Biggest Frustrations In Yoshi And The Mysterious Book
The biggest issue is that the incredible art style can actively get in the way of the gameplay, making it seriously hard to judge certain platforms or even tell if you can stand on them at all. It is also highly annoying that when you first start playing, the game tells you almost nothing, leaving you completely in the dark about how the mechanics work or what you actually need to do to 4-star the levels. You are just left triggering random objective text pop-ups on screen without a clear guide, which can cause plenty of early confusion since this is not a traditional platformer. To make things more irritating, you are completely blocked from viewing or adjusting your controller configurations, egg toss settings, or rumble toggles until you actually load all the way into live gameplay.
Yoshi And The Mysterious Book Overall Verdict: Is It Worth Playing?
Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is a delightfully weird and refreshing shift for the series that values exploration over standard platforming tropes. While the lack of early guidance and the flashy art style can occasionally cause some mechanical frustration, the sheer level of creativity on display makes it incredibly hard to put down. It trades predictable levels for massive vertical playgrounds that grow larger the deeper you dive into Mr E’s pages. If you are looking for a fun, beautifully detailed adventure that actively encourages you to mess around and find your own way, this Switch 2 exclusive is absolutely worth playing.
