Scribblenauts Review

Game: Scribblenauts
System: Nintendo DS
Genre: Puzzle
Developer: 5th Cell
Release date: September 15, 2009 (NA)


Pros: Diverse puzzles, lots of replay value, brilliant premise

Cons: Imprecise stylus controls, frustrating at times

The idea of Scribblenauts is best summed up by its catchphrase: "Write Anything, Solve Everything." The purpose of the game is to solve a variety of puzzles using objects generated by the player. Scribblenauts provides the setting, the clues, and the questions; and it asks players to dream up the answers. So the game allows almost limitless options for each player, a simultaneously liberating and daunting scenario. It's one of the more creative and open games of the past ten years, and it delivers something that was previously thought impossible: the player is allowed to summon almost anything his mind can imagine. Yet Scribblenauts is not without flaws.

Scribblenauts is built around an engine called "Objectnaut," which assigns several properties to the tens of thousands of nouns available in the game. If the player writes "bicycle" into the word entry screen, a bicycle will appear onscreen. And thanks to Objectnaut -- which provides physical characteristics and artificial intelligence for each object -- the bicycle will look and act like a real bicycle. Maxwell can ride it; he can push it down a hill; he can dump it in a lake and it will sink. A huge part of development time was spent on Objectnaut, researching nouns and their properties, and adding them to the database. As a result, players can solve the game's many puzzles with any number of objects, and any combination of objects. To fetch a cat from a tall tree, a player might create a ladder for Maxwell to climb. Alternatively, he might create a mouse to lure the cat down on its own.

How Scribblenauts works, at a glance.

There are over 200 levels in Scribblenauts, organized into two categories: puzzle levels and action levels. Puzzle levels provide a riddle for the player to solve; action levels are, naturally, more action oriented with platform elements, traps, and switches. At the completion of each level, players earn "ollars," the in-game currency that can be used to purchase new worlds and avatars, and "merits," awarded based on the creativity of the player's solution. Because puzzles can be solved again and again, always with different objects, Scribblenauts has huge replay value. Yet not all puzzles are created equally. Some are fun and challenging to play through; others are frustratingly oblique and counter-intuitive. Prepare to experience some quiet rage during Scribblenauts, especially if you plan to finish every last puzzle.

Maxwell flies a helicopter.

Another Scribblenauts frustration is its control scheme. The game uses the touchscreen to control Maxwell AND to manipulate objects, meaning that an imprecise touch on the screen might interrupt a carefully staged object combination, or simply send Maxwell off the nearest cliff. Trust me: this happens more often that you think. The physics in Scribblenauts are another problem. Objects will bounce and fall in strange, unpredictable ways, and often fail to connect to each other on the first attempt.

Still, a few quirks are expected from a game that allows so much freedom and so many open-ended possibilities. Despite some control issues and finicky physics, Scribblenauts mostly delivers on its promise of a game where the player's imagination is the only obstacle, his capacity to invent the only roadblock.