With some of its core features like Lumen and Nanite, Unreal Engine 5 is a demanding game engine that often struggles to run properly on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, so it's not surprising to see that very few games powered by the Epic engine are available on Nintendo Switch 2. However, this could change in the future, as Yoshi and The Mysterious Book will be powered by Unreal Engine 5, a first for a first-party Nintendo game.
The news has been confirmed in a new report from GoNintendo, following the game's Japanese box art emerging online that showed the Unreal Engine logo. While it isn't outright surprising that a Nintendo first-party game is powered by Unreal Engine, as Yoshi's Crafted World, Princess Peach: Showtime! and Pikmin 4 all used Unreal Engine 4, though the latter in combination with Nintendo EPD's own proprietary engine, Yoshi and The Mysterious Book using Unreal Engine 5 is significant, as optimizations made for this game to run at the steady performance Nintendo games always do on each respective system could be easily adopted by other development studios for their games.
Even before the Nintendo Switch 2 launched, there were concerns about its CPU and how it could handle Unreal Engine 5-powered games like Yoshi and The Mysterious Book. The concerns, unfortunately, were confirmed by the first batch of games, as titles such as Cronos: The New Dawn, Fortnite, and Split Fiction do run on the system, but without the engine's core features like Lumen and Nanite. However, the new Lumen Quality Mode currently undergoing testing in Unreal Engine 5.8 could be one of the engine's features that will prevent extreme scaling down of future port.
However, as development of the engine and its features continues, including Lumen Irradiance Cache, the time when the system will have an easier time running the demanding Epic game engine may not be too far off. Hopefully, the first glimpse of this new era will indeed come when Yoshi and The Mysterious Book releases on May 21.
About the author: Francesco De Meo has been covering video games and technology since 2012, starting his career at small outlets like Gamersyndrome and GeekSnack. After joining Wccftech gaming section in 2015, he quickly expanded his video gaming coverage with in-depth reporting, interviews with iconic industry figures such as Grasshopper Manufacture founder and No More Heroes creator Goichi "Suda51" Suda, Resident Evil series creator Shinji Mikami, Team NINJA's president and Nioh series director Fumihiko Yasuda, and Silent Hill creator Keiichiro Toyama, reviews and on-the-ground coverage of major industry events such as Gamescom and E3. When he's not reporting or reviewing, Francesco can be found playing the genres he loves most, spending time with his six cats, reading, writing music, playing guitar and drumming for his progressive rock band.
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