Scribblenauts

Scribblenauts

Scribblenauts turns you into a God. No, more than that: Scribblenauts turns you into a God-maker. Type his hallowed name into the game and, there, right before your very eyes, a cartoonish approximation of the Supreme Being will pop onto the screen. With over 30,000 nouns packed into this tiny cartridge just waiting to be called upon, you’re given the power of a creator, free to write into being anything and everything from obscure 16th Century musical instruments to a tooled-up SWAT team of soldiers.

What’s even more remarkable is that, as well as fully animated versions of just about anything you care to imagine, the game’s depictions of these objects retain many of their real world properties. So, summon a Gorgon into the game and it goes around turning every living thing in the vicinity to stone. But call up a mirror and place it in front of the monster, and it will petrify itself through the reflection. Likewise, create a horse and a saddle and your character, Maxwell, rides it around freely, or throw a toaster into the lake and all the fish rise to the surface, dead and electrocuted. It’s the closest thing to magic that videogames have given us.

And all of this can be enjoyed without venturing off Scribblenauts’ menu screen, where you can tinker around summoning objects and fighting them against one another. But the game’s more than just a conjuring kit, setting you a gigantic array of 220 puzzles to work your way through. These vary in tone and style but all require Maxwell to collect a ‘Starite’ object before they’re completed. For example, you may be asked to supply a farmer with three suitable animals, or to make a packed lunch for a schoolchild. Complete the task and you’re rewarded with a Starite and a score, which is dependent on how inventive your solution was, whether it used violence or weapons (something that’s penalised), and how long it took you to reach it.

To encourage creativity, gold medals are reserved for players who solve a stage three times in a row without reusing a single item, an ingenious way to get you playing with the game rather than merely trying to solve it as quickly as possible. However, there is one issue that drags the experience back from the heady wonder of its first magical touch. The game is generally controlled with the stylus, used to both name and place objects and control Maxwell. This leads to many frustrating moments where you thought you were moving an object around but end up sending Maxwell into lava or a spiked pit instead. Inexplicably, the d-pad controls the camera (it would have made more sense for it to move Maxwell himself) and the lack of an option to switch the control scheme hurts the game considerably.

Another problem with any game based on such emergent gameplay is the opportunity it gives to take the easiest road to a solution. Why agonise over a creative, convoluted answer to puzzle when you can just create a God with a Uzi and be done with it. In a sense then, Scribblenauts is only as good as your imagination and commitment to exploring that imagination. When it’s good, it’s one of the most incredible pieces of software yet conceived. Yet too often, the execution falls a little short of the ambition. Nevertheless, Scribblenauts comes highly recommended, and we eagerly look forward to seeing wherever the concept is headed to next.

4 out of 5