Scribblenauts

I almost didn’t get this one this game after being deterred by a number of game reviews.  Good thing I am not very good at paying attention to instructions, because otherwise I would have missed on a unique experience that continues to surprise and delight me.

I’ve carried around the DS in my pocket for the past week, showing it to anyone I think might appreciate it.  I try to explain it to them: “You solve puzzles by writing anything, and it appears.”

This description doesn’t work very often, so the easiest thing to do is to show them the game.  The game has a “sandbox” mode on the title screen in which you can write whatever you want and make it appear.  Then see how they interact (or you can make them interact with your avatar Maxwell).  Add an elephant and a mouse, and see who wins.  Or see how a celebrity reacts to paparazzi.  Or a cop to donuts.  Or a Republican (complete with red tie!) to Cthulhu.  And that alone is entertaining for a good while longer than it really should be.

The real premise of the game is this: You (as Maxwell, who can be outfitted with different heads) are presented with dozens of puzzles to complete.  They come into two categories: The Puzzle mode has you complete a particular objective, such as helping a girl get her kitty off the roof, an old man passing a visual acuity test, or keeping ants from eating your picnic sandwich without hurting them (and thus upsetting the hippie watching you) .  The Action mode just has you get through a series of obstacles to get the Starite (essentially a star that is your goal).  You can do either one by writing (either on an on-screen keyboard or a less sensitive handwriting recognition panel) to create just about any physical object you can dream up.  You can then use and interact with them to achieve your objective through whatever means is necessary—or imaginable.

Obstacle in your way?  Try a jet pack to fly over it.  Or a shrink ray to make it the obstacle something you can step over.  Or just suck up the obstacle in a black hole.  I needed to move a cow out of a road without hurting it, so I asked myself, “What can safely lift a cow?”  A UFO, of course.  And it works.

The trick to enjoying the game is to do things in as creative a way as possible.  Sure, you can get through a lot with ladders, time bombs, and shovels.  But accomplishing the same thing with an invisibility cloak, a garden gnome, and a pterodactyl is somehow a lot more satisfying.  While the game tries to reward you based on “style,” what it considers to be stylish is frequently at odds with what I find to be truly stylish, but the real fun is to try to imagine what  might work and seeing if it actually does.  In fact, it’s fun enough to see what is in the 20,000 word dictionary itself.

So what about the quibbles that the other reviewers had?  The most frustrating thing about the game is that it’s pretty much all done with the touch screen.  Frankly, the DS touch screen isn’t sensitive enough to allow the game to distinguish between moving Maxwell (done by tapping the screen), having him pick up an object (done by tapping the screen), or having him use the object he’s carrying (done by tapping the screen).  There will undoubtedly be times when Maxwell does something you didn’t intend and gets himself eaten by a T-Rex in the process, making you start over.

But considering the scope of this game, the loving attention that went into creating the cartoony objects and scripting their interactions and behavior, that is really a minor irritation.  Really, I had too much fun seeing if I could come up with new ways to solve puzzles by having have bizarre objects interact with each other—and if the programmers had thought of the same thing as well.  I keep trying to “break” the game by seeing how things might behave together, but often I am surprised that, no, the programmers also realize witches do really like to turn men into frogs at any available opportunity.  And that’s a kind of entertainment I’ve never found anywhere else.