Hands-on: Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is a good palate cleanser after the Mario movie

After seeing The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (stinky! not good!), I could really use a more positive piece of media to associate with Yoshi right now. It's fortuitous timing, then, that Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is right around the corner.

Nintendo's next upcoming Switch 2-exclusive (and, at this point in time, one of the only announced Switch 2 games with a release date) is out May 21, and I got to play a couple of hours of it at a preview event in NYC. While I'm still not entirely sure that this eminently lightweight, kid-friendly adventure is what I want out of a Yoshi game, it's got a really neat take on creative sandbox experimentation and an absolutely gorgeous visual style.

To put it simply, if you like throwing things at other things just to see what will happen — or if you need a new game your young kids can play without getting frustrated — then Yoshi and the Mysterious Book should be on your radar.

Want to learn more about getting the best out of your tech? Sign up for Mashable's Top Stories and Deals newsletters today.

Yoshi and the Mysterious Book just wants you to explore, dude

I will admit that before I got my hands on it, I had a bit of a hard time grasping the core concept of Yoshi's first starring adventure since 2019.

Mysterious Book simultaneously feels like it has a lot going on when you're flutter-jumping around one of its many vibrant, literary worlds. But on a macro level, it's really a game about just doing stuff until you don't feel like doing stuff anymore, without much in the way of time pressure (or any other kind of pressure) to stress the player out.

Its premise finds a group of colorful Yoshi dinosaurs hanging out with a, well, mysterious book called Mr. E. He's a cool, leatherbound encyclopedia with a mustache, but he also seems to have misplaced the contents of his pages, and it's up to Yoshi to jump inside the book and figure out as much information as possible about the fantastical creatures it documents.

Each chapter is a gorgeously illustrated tableau of various creatures hangin' out in their natural habitats, and zooming in on a creature will enter a level based around it.

Once you're in a level, the idea is to simply discover as many weird little systemic interactions between creatures and their environments as you can, primarily by either trying to eat them (as Yoshi is wont to do) or by stashing them on Yoshi's saddle and throwing them at different animals or objects. Discovering different types of interactions rewards the player with stars, which can be used to unlock more levels.

For example, the first level I played involved multi-colored flowers. When I tried to eat one, I got a star for discovering that you can convert them into eggs. When I carried one on my back and passed by a patch of grass, a field of flowers in the same color as the one I had on my back sprouted, giving me another star. The rest of the level mostly revolved around growing flowers in specific places to solve puzzles, and within a few minutes, I'd collected a bunch of stars and was able to leave whenever I wanted to.

Mysterious Book's flow sounds a bit basic and honestly boring when written out like that, but a couple of things keep it from feeling that way in practice.

For starters, simply moving Yoshi around these 2D side-scrolling sandboxes is a delight thanks to sharp platforming and egg-throwing mechanics that have worked for 30 years. Beyond that, Mysterious Book has a fairly jaw-dropping art style that evokes stop-motion animation in a 2D setting.

Some animations purposely have a lower frame rate to create that effect, and between that and the simply outstanding character and environmental art on display, Mysterious Book has one of the coolest looks for any Yoshi game ever.

It also helps that the levels progressively get more involved as they go. One of my favorites involved a certain type of bug that, for lack of a better term, body-snatched various objects in the environment to menace Yoshi. The level happened to be full of watermelons, which the bug could inhabit to turn into a flying seed-spitting machine gun, but luckily, Yoshi could also rapid-fire seeds by eating one.

After a while, the main objective of the level was to quickly eat watermelons before the bugs could get to them, and if they did get to one, the game briefly turned into a fun little side-scrolling shootout between Yoshi and a flying watermelon.

Of course, there were also lots of other goofy things going on in the environment, so if I wanted to, I could ignore the watermelon bugs and just poke and prod at other things to collect discovery stars.

Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is a very safe space

I'm very into the idea of little 2D sandboxes where everything can interact with everything else, and Yoshi and the Mysterious Book seems to be thoroughly constructed around that idea. My one and only potential hangup with it after the demo I played is that, as a demo attendant told me, Yoshi cannot take damage or die in this game. When the watermelon bugs spit seeds at Yoshi, the worst thing that can happen is that the player just gets a little annoyed.

I'm not dense enough to misunderstand the target audience for Mysterious Book — young gamers.

I think kids will enjoy this Yoshi title even more than I did

This upcoming title is overtly kid-forward in a way that not every Nintendo game does, and that's broadly a good thing. The uncomplicated gameplay is ideal for young button mashers who just want to run around and try stuff.

I think it kicks ass that Nintendo is producing high-quality software that can be enjoyed by players young and old, especially in a world where seemingly every other game marketed to kids is some kind of Roblox nightmare. Having said that, removing any sense of risk from Mysterious Book made portions of the demo feel a bit aimless and not super exciting.

However, I'm open to the possibility that over the course of the full game, I'll be able to settle into Yoshi and the Mysterious Book's distinctly and, at times, delightfully lackadaisical rhythm. We'll find out together next month.

Yoshi and the Mysterious Book launches exclusively on Nintendo Switch 2 on May 21. It's available for pre-order now at Nintendo and Amazon for $69.99.