Nintendo has incorporated Epic Games’ technology into some of its products, but we haven’t yet seen the full capabilities of the engine on Nintendo hardware.

Unreal Engine 5 is a very resource-intensive game engine with core features like Lumen and Nanite that often struggle to run properly on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. Therefore, it’s no surprise that very few games built with Epic’s engine are currently available on the Nintendo Switch 2. However, this may change in the future. Yoshi and the Mysterious Book was created using Unreal Engine 5, marking the first time this has happened among Nintendo’s first-party titles.

Yoshi and the Mysterious Book display box

Made in Unreal Engine. pic.twitter.com/xI76zobXdG

– Genki✨ (@Genki_JPN) April 23, 2026

The game’s Japanese cover art appeared online, revealing the Unreal Engine logo. It’s not entirely surprising that a Nintendo first-party game uses the Unreal Engine, since Yoshi’s Crafted World, Princess Peach: Showtime! and Pikmin 4 used Unreal Engine 4 (though the latter combined it with Nintendo EPD’s proprietary engine), the use of Unreal Engine 5 in Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is significant. The game is optimized to deliver stable performance on the given system, similar to Nintendo games, and this optimization can easily be adopted by other development studios for their own games.

Even before the Nintendo Switch 2 was released, there were concerns about its CPU and how it would handle games running on Unreal Engine 5. Unfortunately, the first batch of games confirmed these concerns, as titles like Cronos: The New Dawn, Fortnite, and Split Fiction run on the system but lack the engine’s core features, so neither Nanite nor Lumen is used.

However, since the engine and its features (including Lumen) are still being developed, it may not be too long before the system can easily run Epic’s demanding technology. Hopefully, Yoshi and the Mysterious Book, set to release on May 21, will offer a true glimpse into this new era.

Source: WCCFTech