The power of words

So just what the hell is Scribblenauts, exactly? It’s a 2-D action puzzle game, for lack of a better term, with a whole dictionary-sized catalog of words you can choose to conjure.

Of course, that’s half the fun. As Maxwell, Scribblenauts‘ rooster hat-wearing protagonist, you have to collect starites, special items that are placed within levels of the game. The trick is that you either have to solve a puzzle or use items to get to the starites before you can collect them.

The puzzles can be as easy as pushing a whale into the ocean or reuniting a crying girl with her roof-bound kitten. In other levels, the starite might be behind a switch-activated door or up in a tree. It’s up to you and your imagination to summon whatever you deem necessary to perform a task.

The beauty of Scribblenauts, aside from its truly unique premise and simple hand-drawn aesthetic, is that there is no right way to solve a puzzle. I’ll give you an example of an early puzzle I came across that instructed Maxwell to collect some flowers and deliver them, in a basket, to a girl.

Between Maxwell and the flowers, there was a hostile bee buzzing around, as well as a small pool of water with a piranha swimming around it. Clearly, death would come quickly from one if not both of these encounters.

A reasonable solution would be to arm Maxwell with a net or some other kind of bee-catching device to capture the bee and then build, say, a suspension bridge over the water. Instead, I typed “UFO” into the notepad. Maxwell jumped in the ship, which had a tractor beam. Both bee and piranha were no longer a threat.

Of course, when faced with the same puzzle you could as easily summon a tank to blow the bee to kingdom come, or god knows what else. It’s entirely up to you. Whatever you choose to do will have effects on other items you’ve created.

Creatures and people have simple A.I., and may get hungry and attack you or each other. Maxwell can equip items or tools, and ride animals and vehicles. Everything is subject to simple physics and logical properties of mass and weight, and reacts as different types of material.

And to think, this is all on a goddamn DS cartridge.

There are a few limitations to your utter omnipotence, however—logical ones, really. No proper nouns, dirty words or copyrighted words are allowed, for example. There are some exceptions to this rule, however. Ever wondered how Einstein might react when meeting a cthulhu? Now you can find out!

In all honesty, you probably won’t even get to Scribblenauts‘ game proper for sometime after you turn it on. The title screen lets you write to your heart’s content—or until you hit the screen limit which keeps the game from freezing.

The first thing I did with the game was summon a disc, like a Frisbee. But I wanted a diskette, so I summoned that too. Then a CD and a DVD. Then I summoned a dinosaur that looked like an allosaur, and after that a Velociraptor. Finally I created a black hole, which sucked everything up.

Why did I choose these particular items? I don’t have a clue. And it doesn’t matter. You’ll have similar experiences playing Scribblenauts. Or simply playing around on the title screen.

There’s just one problem with the game: Maxwell’s controls are a little finicky. You move him around with the stylus, pointing him in the direction you want him to go, and can interact with objects by tapping them. Your notepad is also accessed this way.

But Maxwell will often zip past an intended target, or you might accidentally move something you created rather than picking it up or getting inside of it. It takes a little patience as well as some trial and error, but the controls are by no means a deterrent to the game—just a slight blemish on an otherwise brilliant experience.

So what are you waiting for? You’ve got babies to chainsaw, right?