Play Super Mario World 2 Plus - Yoshi's Island Online

Yoshi's Island came out on the Super Nintendo in 1995, developed and published by Nintendo. It arrived late in the SNES life cycle, a time when developers were really pushing what the hardware could do visually, and it shows in the game's hand-drawn, pastel-heavy art style that still looks unique decades later.

You control Yoshi, carrying a crying Baby Mario on your back, and your goal is to safely reunite him with his lost brother across dozens of side-scrolling stages. The core mechanics involve using your tongue to swallow enemies and turn them into throwable eggs, which you then aim to hit targets, solve puzzles, or defeat bosses. The game constantly introduces new transformations, like a helicopter or submarine, to navigate specific obstacles. The pacing is deliberate, focused more on exploration and collecting flowers, coins, and red stars in each level than on pure speed, though some later challenges ramp up the difficulty significantly. It feels inventive and consistently surprising, like the designers had a new idea for every single screen.