Article and illustration by Dylan C. Lathrop

I know what the feelings are towards Scribblenauts. It felt like leading up to the launch that this 5th Cell / WB product that the gaming world had cemented this title as the landmark game for the DS. Maybe that's too heady — but that's certainly how it felt. Now, usually this type of hype would bear down on a reviewer such as myself, maybe even make me look for the negative in something, but that just wasn't the case with Scribblenauts. It was so overwhelmingly everything I had wanted in a puzzle game, especially in my younger years, that I was psyched to play it from the onset.



The game is simple enough, and again, if you've been following the lead up everywhere else, you should know the premise, but I'll rehash for rehashing's sake: you play as a young boy named Maxwell, who carries a notebook, pencil, odd hat and earphones. Somehow, this young tike gets mixed up in all sorts of strange puzzles, ranging from simply helping out a friendly chef, to theft of objects. The ambiguity of these situations is pretty enjoyable, because they exude the wackiness that makes a game like this so successful. Not having a background story, or situational reasoning beyond solving a puzzle really opens up the enjoyment of this, because it lends to the idea of imagination that is so critical of the game. But this might also be where I felt a disconnect from the game. For the first few tries I found myself reliant on how I usually solve puzzlers, which is often based on what is of use in a certain level and deducing the best course of action. Scribblenauts asks more of you, because you have to dial in what you think is the best tool or object to accomplish the task at hand.

This, of course, inevitably led me to repeating myself over and over again. The idea of new objects for different levels seemed fruitless, especially when I found that a jetpack was so convenient to zip around to high surfaces. I can't tell if this is a problem of the user, or of the game, but once you find something you like doing, it seemed like that was the best course of action when it came up again. Another go to was the lasso, as I discovered it was so easy to pull the "Starites" (the little star icons you need to collect to finish a level). This became too easy, and thus, sucked the fun out of a few levels.



This added a new burden to me as the player: outthinking myself. To score the style and new object points at the end of a level became a primary concern, and as such stretched me to try and figure out new, imaginative ways to solve the puzzles, often times cluttering up the puzzle and having to retry the level all over. It's so fun to be able to create any object to piece together a puzzles and advance, but it's also so hard when you figure out the groove of the game and can zip through some of these levels, often time not employing that key thing the game asks of you.

I also had issues with the controls. Rarely has a game used the stylus as the set up for controls successfully, and Scribblenauts sadly falls prey to the same issues. Moving Maxwell around by pointing in general directions gets frustrating, because sometimes he overshoots, sometimes he doesn't move enough, and at any given point those things can cause you to restart. Selecting items make sense when you click on them to perform an action, but sometimes because of the loose paper-doll aesthetics / physics, this causes Maxwell to suddenly drop everything, or it doesn't perform the way you expect it to and your left having to redo what you've just accomplished. That's pretty much a minor annoyance though, all in all. Granted, the frustration level goes up the further you get into the game.

Scribblenauts is an achievement. The programming and ideas presented alone are worthy of some heavy praise. And I still am enamored with both of those aspects to the game. Still, considering how much people have invested into this, and how high the bar has been set, I sense myself and others are ultimately left wanting. And that wanting comes in finesse of the controls and of the overall gameplay. Prescribe the situations a bit better to leave a more imaginative solution and tweak the wonky stylus controls, and things will be right as rain. I will continue to play Scribblenauts, just with some minor grumbles and groans, much to the delight of anyone within a room wide radius of me.

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Second Opinion
from Toby Jones

Scribblenauts deserves to be heavily lauded for delivering on its concept alone, and the fact that there's a fully-formed game on top of it almost feels like a bonus. The central dynamic of summoning anything you can imagine and doing whatever you want with it is enjoyable enough that it feels like they almost could have sold us the title screen (where you are free to simply play around) and called it a day. As I played on I found myself dealing with the same control problems that Dylan did, but the creativity and novelty of the game had filled my heart with enough good will that I wasn't too bothered.

The amount of fun you have with Scribblenauts is almost entirely dependent on your willingness to come up with new and creative ways to solve puzzles. It's easy to fall into patterns with what you summon, but the more you repeat yourself the less fun the game becomes. Keep that in mind, and enjoy one of the most dizzyingly creative and ambitious games out there. It's not one of the greatest games of all time, but I think it will continue to be one of the most talked about.

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