Scribblenauts Review

Matt Scullion

Imagine you can have anything you want, anything at all...except sexy things...or alcohol...or copyrighted property...or proper nouns, such as names...or abstract nouns like “happiness” or “love” or “a less picky game”. The entire premise of Scribblenauts is that for no adequately explained reason you have the power to call anything you can think of into existence simply by keying it in to your DS , but as I explained its slightly limited to “anything you can imagine if you're criminally innocent”, while it is true that you have access to a plethora of different weapons and concepts, including many manners of firearms and mythological creatures, the game is still limited by the fact that any average person's imagination is only creative up to a certain point.

Working through the game's ‘story’ mode will present you with a series of puzzles and challenges based around spawning any item you want- thing is, once you have a couple of objects that you know work well you will stick to these like annoying little bits of fluff to a sock. In the first set of levels you will (very likely)  find something new to fulfil the conditions of every puzzle. But after two or three sets of levels the novelty wears off, and you’re left using the Flying Item + Attachment formula every single time, until the very end of the game. To begin with I was having a great time, racking my brains for the most far-out, weird and wonderful things I could come up with in order to solve the puzzles, but about halfway into the third set I found myself just using the Pterodactyl whenever I needed to fly, the chains whenever I needed to transport any given item from point A to point B, a wall whenever I needed to stop anything etc. The game suffers from two of the same effects as most “sandbox” games: firstly, while the puzzles can be solved using “anything you can imagine”, they will all be different items that serve the same purpose; “something to make me fly” can be fulfilled for example by a variety of creatures and devices, from a common or garden helicopter to a mythical creature such as a Roc or Chinese Dragon- but you'll end up using them exactly the same way. The other problem common in this sort of game is the effect of so much choice effectively crippling you- with tens of thousands of items to choose from, you can't pick any at all, instead sticking to the stuff you've already used and now how will work. Add the strange control style to this (with the jumping being handled automatically) and you have one hell of a frustrating game. Almost every time I picked the game up in hopes of finishing a couple of extra puzzles I would shut the DS within a couple of minutes, frustrated and annoyed.

The idea behind Scribblenauts is great and some of the puzzles are genuinely engaging, but it’s more hit or miss than great every time. Some of the puzzles are so specific that when you finally figure out how to solve them you'll feel a right plonker for not coming to the conclusion sooner. Take for example the  level which is a homage the back to future series about midway through the game- you're presented with a mad professor on a clock tower, a wire next to a storm cloud and are given the hint “get to 88 miles an hour”. Obviously the game is instructing you to enact the film’s final scene, but instead of being a fun exercise you end up forcing yourself to remember every last detail about the movie. In order to make the puzzle work until you finally come to the realisation that you must attach a flux capacitor to a sports car rather than a normal car or a race-car, making it more of a hit-and-miss experience. You have to get the specific object the creators hand-picked for you, rather than it all being by merit of your own creativity.

Now don't get me wrong- I like this game, I honestly do. It’s just a little less than advertised, as there are hundreds of weapons available and yet only two animations for attacking, one for melee, one for ranged. The game doesn't particularly seem to subscribe to any known laws of physics either, attaching an anchor to a fly in an effort to make it sink has no more success than placing a piece of paper on top of a JCB would. This is understandable, as the developers would have had to be mentally workaholic in order to make the game accurate, but it'd be nice to have a little bit of a hierarchy in terms of weight to help with some puzzles. I can't exactly comment on the music from my experience since I never play my DS with the sound on, but post-completion of the game listening showed me some cheery little tunes that would've annoyed the hell out of me if I'd been listening to them throughout playing. It's nice, but just a little bit twee for my taste.
In summation, Scribblenauts does deliver exactly what it advertises- pretty much anything you could ever think of can be conjured out of thin air for your personal use. But the puzzles given really aren’t up to much. In my personal opinion an enjoyable start screen is never a bad thing, but once it becomes the highlight of your purchase you're left scratching your head a bit.

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