Scribblenauts is the game of my dreams. I mean that literally… it’s the type of game that an 8-year-old version of myself would have dreamt about, without believing that such a game could be possible, and yet here it is on my Nintendo DS.
The concept is simple, yet profound; you are an odd-looking boy with a rooster hat named Maxwell, and there are a series of minor tasks for you to complete. The reward for solving these tasks is a starite. However, instead of taking the usual video game route where you have very few items to work with and must rely on your skill, in this game, you can summon into existence ANY OBJECT YOU CAN THINK OF to help you on your way. (There are restrictions to the “anything you can think of” rule, like not including vulgar terms, shapes, Latin names, or copyrighted things, but those restrictions do make a lot of sense, and don’t ruin the overall game.)
For example; on the far side of a lake, there is a flower that you have to pick, but between you and the flower is an angry bee that won’t let you go past it. How do you get rid of it? That is entirely up to you. Flyswatter? Sure, it works. Bug spray? That works too. Boomerang? Yep. Sword? Absolutely. Venus’ flytrap? Um… actually, I’m not sure about that one, let me check…
*a few seconds later*
OK, Venus flytrap doesn’t actually try to eat the bee. However, dropping the plant on the bee’s head seems to kill it. This illustrates one of the downsides about Scribblenauts. Just because you can summon nearly anything doesn’t mean that it will always act the way you may expect. An ostrich will not bury its head in sand. Playing the flute will not make rats follow you. A ceiling fan will not automatically attach to most ceilings.
In making this game, 5th Cell – the creators of the game – were doomed to at least some level of failure, because everyone who picks up the game will eventually find something that the game will not do. It has no hope of living up to anyone’s wildest expectation. However, it does do at least half of the things that I could dream up for it, and that’s amazing in itself. Monkeys will eat bananas and swing on vines. Elephants will run from mice (and so will mammoths). Electrocuting a corpse will turn it into a zombie, who will in turn try to turn any living human around it into a zombie.
It is a game that amazes me, but I couldn’t have a proper review of the game without mentioning its biggest flaws. There are two big ones that have dominated game reviews for Scribblenauts since the game launched, and I have to mention them here as well: player control and camera control.
All player movement is done with the DS stylus, rather than most games where control is done with the pushing of buttons. The problem with this is that the manipulating of objects in the game is also done with the stylus, meaning that you frequently move Maxwell around when you mean to pick up an object (or vice versa). When I first started playing this game, this annoyed me, but I’ve quickly found the solution for this… move Maxwell as little as possible. If there’s an enemy between me and the starite I need to get, I don’t give Maxwell a machete and try to fight the enemy myself. Nope, I send a T-Rex after him, or bury him in quicksand. The less that Maxwell does, the better.
The camera control problem is a harder one to deal with. You see, you use the buttons on the DS to scroll the camera around to the part of the level that you want to put an object in. The unfortunate problem is that the camera will automatically recenter you on Maxwell after a few seconds, and while that’s sometimes good in large levels when you have forgotten where Maxwell is, it usually is a pain in the butt. It makes levels longer and more tedious than they need to be.
There is a wide variety of things to do in Scribblenauts. The game contains 220 levels, although the game shines most for me in levels where you have a very simple task to do and can choose from a hundred different ways to do it. I should also mention that this isn’t the type of game that you’re likely to play for five hours at a time. I find it best to pick it up for twenty minutes, do a level or two, and shut it off again, because then the whimsy of being able to make any object I please to solve a problem stays fresh in my mind, and I enjoy the experience even more.
Scribblenauts is definitely worth buying, despite its flaws, and if the creators of Scribblenauts were to create a sequel that had better controls and more types of item interactions, I’d be first in line to buy that too. 5th Cell, my inner 8-year-old thanks you.
