Yoshi and the Mysterious Book Review

Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is the strangest thing Nintendo has published in a while, and the spread of reviews shows it. Good-Feel builds a living encyclopedia rather than a platformer. You open a chapter, meet the creature that lives on that page, work out what it wants, and use what you learn to trigger entries and earn the stars that unlock more of the book. Enemies cannot hurt you. There are no lives, no pits that kill and effectively no fail state anywhere in it, which is either the most generous design Nintendo has shipped in years or the removal of the thing that made Yoshi's Island worth finishing.

Reviewers landed on both sides of that and rarely in between, which is why a game this well made sits where it does. Nobody argues about the craft. This is the studio behind Woolly World and Crafted World working on hardware that can finally hold the idea, and every page looks like an object somebody built by hand, with lighting and paper texture doing work no earlier Yoshi could afford. The discovery loop has real pull, especially in chapters where a creature's behavior is the puzzle.

It thins in the back half, once the book asks for more stars than the chapters can interestingly supply and the collecting starts to show through. Story is a frame, a mischievous narrator and a book to fill, holding the pages together rather than asking to be followed.