Ambition is a tricky thing to manage in a new IP, you need to have enough so that it captures some hearts and minds and starts the word-of-mouth flow, and at the same time it has to be realistic enough that the project is actually delivers on the vision, if it even gets completed. So when you say “This games thing is that you can type anything in and it’ll appear in the game for you to use,” it instantly draws scepticism. However, once people start having a little playtime with the game and it passes the little tests like, “Yes, grimalkin is in the game,” and suddenly there’s a lot for the title to live up to, as far as expectations are concerned.
For those that haven’t been following the mostly word-of-mouth hype, Scribblenauts is a DS game, where you play as Maxwell, who has the ability to summon anything he wants by writing it down. The end goal of this is to obtain the Starite in each level, by fulfilling the requirements stipulated at the beginning. These go from being quite straight forward at the beginning, like “Give Santa something he likes but doesn’t have” to vague and esoteric towards the end, like “Type the answer.” Victory earns you level unlocks, merits (awards denoting the way in which you solved the puzzle) and the games currency, ‘ollars’ which can be used to purchase new areas/levels and other goodies.
The dictionary Scribblenauts uses is truly impressive, and because of this, it makes a good first impression when every word (non-vulgar, non-copyrighted nouns, of course,) you can think of appears to have been thought of. ButtonMashers own 2-degrees of separation from this game is that at E3, man-on-the-ground, Feep, wrote a preview that he reposted (the uncensored, expletive-filled version) on the popular gaming forum, NeoGAF. “Post 217” as it was known became so popular that both it and Feep are both in the game.
At its best, Scribblenauts is a word game, trying to think of that right item that will suit the situation, and it’s evocative of a crossword puzzle. Winning a level gives you the ability to play it again, but it ups the ante; at that point you have to finish it three times in a row, without reusing any words. Synonyms are fair game though, and in basically every situation the resulting items, like “chopper” and “helicopter” are functionally identical.
Unfortunately, at its worst, Scribblenauts is a terrible action game. The controls are almost entirely burdened on the stylus, and this leads to plenty of unfortunate chaos when a pixels difference means that instead of picking up an object with a press, you’ll press the space instead, causing Maxwell to eagerly lumber on over, messing everything up. Some of the problems can also be attributed to the physics – while they work for the most part, there are quirks that will frustrate even those with saintly patience. The biggest of these quirks is that Maxwell running seems to exert a disproportionate amount of force, so when you incorrectly press an ‘open’ space, the best case scenario seems to be that Maxwell will run in and upset your carefully arranged objects. In the worst case scenario, he’ll attempt to run in from the other side of the level, with complete disregard to the hazards that lie in between, probably resulting in an untimely death. More to this, any engagement with an enemy becomes quite fiddly, and nigh impossible in a pinch. First you have to hit up the note pad, writing in “BAZOOKA” is fine because it pauses the game, but from there, you need to drag the weapon on to Maxwell, which is tough if he’s in a fist fight, as you might give it to his enemy if they’re closely muddled up! Then you have to press on the enemy and select “shoot” or “attack”. Ideally I would have liked this to be a moot point because the game wouldn’t be about the combat, but unfortunately there are levels which seem to have the idea that Scribblenauts is a passable action game. When faced with those situations, it’s easy to get snide and say something about how my imagination would solve that puzzle by imagining a game where the controls weren’t crippling my enjoyment, but that’s not an accepted phrase. There are also plenty of other quirks that are less than endearing, like the fact that typing in certain different kinds of bridges will give you bridges of different sizes or the fact the some object don’t behave like you’d expect; the biggest glaring issue that comes to mind here is that Maxwell, holding a fire extinguisher, found it more appealing to continually run into a fire rather than use the extinguisher on it. It’s a real bummer when things like that occur and it reinforces the fact that it’s not simply your imagination solving puzzles, it’s your imagination synching up to how the designer imagined the puzzle should be solved.
The level editor also seems severely limited, when compared to the way things work in the standard set. From my quick run through of it, it looks as though Starites have to exist in the level, and not spawned by some criteria, which implies to me that all the custom levels will be solvable by brute force alone.
As much as I’ve harped on about the bummers in the control and nuances, but there’s still some really good moments brought about by the feeling of exhalation you get from exercising your vocabulary in the more subtle puzzles, and the visual style is borderline adorable. This is the kind of game I would like to think children could play as a learning tool to practising English, given the ridiculous number of recognised nouns.
Closing Comments
Scribblenauts is almost two games that are at odds with each other, on the one had it’s an awful action game with dubious middling construction elements, and on the other it’s a remarkable technical feat with staggering object interaction and clever riddle like puzzles that will test your vocabulary and coerce you into contorting your frame of mind to catch references or twists to common convention. Unfortunately, the net worth of Scribblenauts is heartbreakingly average. The highs are high, but the lows are equally low.
Looking forward to reading more. Great post.Much thanks again. Much obliged.