Yoshi's Cookie: Bland Vanilla Flavour But Still A Cookie

This little puzzler game proves that Yoshi gobbles down more than red fruit and random enemies. Cookies! Or does it? Yoshi or Mario are not exactly involved in the eating and making go away of the little pastry forms. Instead, they’re banished to the right side of the screen where they have to turn a wheel to make them appear out of thin air. Even Kirby’s Star Stacker has more Kirby flavour than this bland vanilla cookie, but let’s take a small nibble anyway. Perhaps there’s a juicy marzipan surprise inside.

The reason for the apparent blandness is the interesting history of Yoshi’s Cookie. The insightful Game Boy Essentials article from Pierre-Luc Gagné delves deeper into this topic. Yoshi’s Cookie is a rebranded version (who would have thought) of an obscure puzzle game called Hermetica developed by Home Data that our good old Tetris Company friend Henk Rogers managed to procure and license under Bullet-Proof Software for Nintendo. It was initially styled as an alchemy-based game. Eight months after the GB and NES release, Nintendo/Bullet-Proof/TOSE ported an “enhanced” version onto the SNES. At this point, I lost track as to who did what version. I only have the GB cart, which is, depending on your view, the inferior version.

Why? Because Pajitnov, our Russian Tetris god, designed a puzzle mode for Yoshi’s Cookie on the NES that is very good—but also very much absent in the GB version for some reason. Game Boy players got to play around with cookies all right, but there wasn’t a lot of variation. Again, referring back to Kirby’s Star Stacker as another flavoured falling block puzzler, that one had a bunch of game modes, whereas Yoshi’s Cookie only has 1P or 2P modes. Yay?

Luckily, we GB players had the Link Cable. Yoshi’s Cookie is just like Tetris a great example of local multiplayer fun where you can screw your fellow baker by rotating those rows or columns more quickly and messing with their board as a result. In 2026, recreating that experience is next to impossible, which means I’ll have to be content with the AI opponent that does god-knows-what and always seems to beat me. The 1P mode it is, then.

As you start your single player session, you can set a few different things, just like a classic Tetris session: the round (1-10, configures the difficulty and amount of different cookies appearing), the music type (A-B-C), and the drop speed (slow-medium-fast). After that, it’s Pizza Time! No wait, different game. The gameplay itself is fairly simple: rotate a row or column just like a Rubric’s cube to match cookies of the same type. If you manage to create a row or column with the same type, it’s cleared. Creating chains is possible and in later stages very much required to pull off to make quick work of the levels.

In Yoshi’s Cookie, blocks (I’m sorry, “cookies”) do not only fall from above: they also enter the screen from the right. Clearing everything means you win the level, but it’s surprisingly difficult to pull by randomly clearing whatever catches your eye as in the end you always end up with four cookie types that do not match. The result is a rapidly growing stack of more unwelcome pastries. Again, the trick is to prepare your chains accordingly, which I apparently suck at.

Yoshi’s Cookie is an OK falling block puzzler. Its mechanics are unique enough to warrant a purchase even if you already own Tetris—which, if you have a Game Boy and live in the US or EU, you do. Yet I wish the puzzle mode made its way onto the cart. I’d rather play Kirby’s Star Stacker because of the different game modes and more world building flavour: a part of the blocks are Kirby-ish things. Here, the cookies are… cookies? What does that have to do with Yoshi? Do we see Yoshi eating those things in Super Mario World? I thought not.

The cartridge doesn’t support any Super Game Boy specifics so there’s nothing to “unlock” by putting it in your SNES. The box art is lying as well: Yoshi’s tongue never comes even remotely near the cookies. The intermission animations provide a few seconds of fun but before you know it, you’re rotating bland cookie rows again. Some of the original reviews lamented the ghosting of the GB and the fact that grayscale makes it more difficult to quickly recognise which cookie is which. Compared to the NES and SNES versions, that is indeed a bit of a disadvantage: in hectic later rounds, quickly trying to scan the field to match up those donuts was more straining on my eyes than I anticipated.

So what should you do when you see a copy of Yoshi’s Cookie for sale on a flea market? If you don’t plan on owning the (S)NES versions, I’d still say pick it up if it’s cheap and you appreciate early Game Boy falling block puzzlers. It’s different enough from Tetris, Dr. Mario et al., but don’t expect any complex mechanics from this 1992 (JPN)/1993 (UK/US) release.

If only that puzzle mode was present…