The Charge:
Write anything, solve anything.
Opening Statement:
Rumored, whispered about, discussed and debated—rarely does a Nintendo DS game see so much speculation. Enter Scribblenauts, developed by 5th Cell, winner of “Best of Show” at E3 2009, the first portable game ever to do so. From its earliest teaser trailers and first-hand reports, people knew this was going to be something significant, a game with endless possibilities and creative applications.
Well, kinda. Now that the game is in hand, hindsight tells us it was almost impossible for it to live up to everyone’s expectations. In many ways, Scribblenauts is exactly as advertised—you can write anything into it, and it appears. The possibilities and combinations of items are seriously impressive, and you will be stunned at how much time and energy has gone into predicting every weird object you could possibly think to conjure. On the other hand, something had to give… and where things go tepid are the gameplay elements.
Facts of the Case:
You are Maxwell, and your job is to collect “Starites” – little sparkling star items. Why? Who cares? What matters in the world of Scribblenauts is what you can do. You have a notepad, and in it, anything you write comes to life, magically, instantly. With over ten themed environments and 220 levels to play in, the possibilities are endless. There are thousands of ways to solve a single puzzle, based only on your creativity. They call it “emergent gameplay”. You’ll call it fun.
Panda, crown, motorcycle... check!
The Evidence:
Scribblenauts is fun, seriously fun. This f-word is one you will see me using a lot in this review, because it is absolutely the simplest and most succinct way to describe this Nintendo DS game. Fun! You’ve never really played a game quite like this before. It is cutting edge, new and exciting. The game itself is a construct, the barest objectives established—Maxwell needs to get the Starite on each level to proceed. You can play any level in any order, or solve it any way you want. You can go back and repeat levels, and are rewarded for coming up with new solutions. You are given points (currency) for how quick you solve a problem, for how few items you need to conjure, and for how “creative” a solution you come up with. If a Starite is in a tree, summoning a ladder will give you the most rudimentary of scores… but summoning a dinosaur, a fishing pole, a rope and a piece of meat, then attaching the meat to the rope, to the pole, sitting on the dinosaur, and riding it to the tree will score big points. That is, if the dinosaur doesn’t try and eat you first. Either way, there’s no penalty for failure! You get infinite attempts.
There are limits, of course. Scribblenauts boasts a word list of over 22,000 entries, but there are restrictions on what can be summoned. You can’t pull up trademarked items, or profane or sexual items, things like that. “Taser” is a no-no, but “stun gun” works fine. Descriptive modifiers on items may or may not work, like colors. “White bear” may not work as expected, but “polar bear” would. With a bit of trial-and-error, you should find very little you are unable to summon. Internet memes, forces of nature, large hadron colliders, Cthulu—you name it, it’s in here. Some objects don’t always make sense, but they usually come back with something—I tried to summon a “miner” to dig a hole for me, but I ended up with a Viking. No idea why. If the game does not recognize your spelling (entered via keyboard or by quirky handwriting recognition) it will suggest closest matches. There are also limits to how many summoned items you can have in play on any given level (no doubt a restriction of the DS system) which the game will alert you to via a thermostat-like bar. You can always drag items into the trash can when you’re done with them, or when you want to try something else. Recycling is a must!
The sunglasses are a must.
Did I mention this was fun? It really, really is. You pick up Scribblenauts, and can be playing within seconds. No complicated storyline, no annoying restrictions—just play the level you want. New stages and avatar-appearances can be purchased via the currency (Ollars) but I found I was rolling in the stuff and could unlock almost all the levels within twenty minutes of game play. The failures of solving missions can often be as fun as the solutions—like summoning criminals to distract the police officers guarding the Starite in a museum-like setting, only to have the police officer kill the criminal, then move onto Maxwell. Whoops. Get a few people you know playing, and expect to spend a lot of time regaling each other with the spectacular and quirky failures and successes of each level.
And here’s where the game gets into a bit of trouble. The game elements are so open-ended that it actually poses a conceptual problem to Scribblenauts: do you spend endless agonizing hours wresting with Rube Goldberg-esque combinations of machine items, summoned characters, objects and accoutrement to solve a simple puzzle, or do you just summon a jetpack and fly up into the tree to rescue the cat? Yes, it’s fantastic and entertaining and awe-inspiring to pull off esoteric solutions to simple problems, but the game doesn’t really reward you sufficiently for the effort—you get a few more points and a little more currency, but not enough to justify the aneurysm you give yourself trying to figure out how to put the poison on the meat and throw it to the piranha (instead of throw the bottle of poison at the piranha, like I kept doing).
Robotic T-Rex vs. Superhero!
On the subject of game mechanics, the biggest execution problem with Scribblenauts is the control scheme. The D-pad moves the camera, and all movement (jumping, walking, etc) is performed by sweeps and taps on the touch screen. This is a very awkward experience for all involved. Expect to hurl your DS across the floor a few times as an errant tap with the stylus sends your character into a spiked pit, or into a pool of water with a shark, when you actually intended him to walk up a ladder. Interactions with items are handled by tapping the item, the character, or the NPC. Alas, it isn’t immediately clear which item expects which behavior to perform the expected action. Watch in frustration as the item you conjured gets hurled like a baseball at the NPC, causing him to attack you mercilessly (failing the level) when in actuality you just wanted to hand the item to him. Scribblenauts has a very clear categorization of what items can perform what functions—thrown, shot, put in, taken out, climbed, etc—but this information is not immediately made clear to the player. You can summon tens of thousands of items, but you can’t always interact with them in the way you expect to. At times, the simplest of objectives becomes a horrible, endless sequence of trial and error trying to get your character to perform the basest of actions without maiming himself.
In many ways, these are game-breaking elements. It’s impossible to ignore these issues; they are festering and pulsing right in your face at all times, crippling the utopic experience many gamers envisioned after getting wind of early demos and screenshots of Scribblenauts . In other ways, it doesn’t really matter. This is a game where you get out of it what you put into it—or what you type into it, to be exact. Yes, the controls are borked, and yes, the endless sandbox solution system leads to more frustration and confusion than actual puzzle solving—but so what? It’s impossible to deny that Scribblenauts is fun, fun, fun! If you don’t mind eschewing the actual levels and just mucking about with the near endless potential of the game to cause mayhem and mischief, the potential is endless.
Summon a vampire at your own risk. Seriously.
Closing Statement:
A brilliant idea executed awkwardly, Scribblenauts is a marvelously entertaining game, right up until the realization that the endless creativity is a gameplay hindrance. You can conjure up tens of thousands of items, but to what end? “Spleen” isn’t something you need to be able to pull up to solve any problem, ever, and there’s only so many Cthulu vs. God on a skateboard vs. vampire with a shotgun combinations you can kick out before getting bored. Once you figure out the half-dozen or so genuinely useful items, you whiz through every level without breaking a sweat. Add to this the frustratingly awkward game mechanics, and Scribblenauts falls short of its revolutionary promise.
And yet, it’s still an absolute recommendation. Weird contradiction, I know, but you have to give it to 5th Cell for creating a game that tries to think outside the box. It will be a long time before we see a game as genuinely creative as this. And it is endlessly fun, so long as you set your expectations reasonably. I haven’t experienced as much delight with a Nintendo DS game in quite a while as the simple act of seeing what ridiculous items can be conjured. Sure, they’re useless in the game, but that’s beside the point.
The Verdict:
Platform: Nintendo DS
Developer: 5th Cell
Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Release Date: September 15th, 2009
Rated: Everyone 10 and older