Scribblenauts (DS) Mini-Review

You may be asking yourself, “Why is iTZKooPA only doing a mini-review of the most innovative game of 2009?”  Simple, the game, while incredibly innovative, is very basic.  Hence, a mini-review is perfect.

Let’s get one thing straight, Scribblenauts absolutely blew me away when I played it at E3, and again at Penny Arcade Expo.  Players are given a simple task at the outset of each stage, to solve the puzzle at hand using their imagination.  To do this we are handed a dictionary and an in-game avatar.  Any tool we need we can type into the dictionary and it will pop up in the world for us to place.  At this point the object will interact with the environment, including our avatar if we tell him to.

For example, we may be tasked with rescuing a princess from a castle on the ledge.  But we cannot harm the witch that is aggressive to Maxwell (our avatar) and in the way (obviously).  There’s countless ways you could go about this.  In fact, I did it three different ways.  Only they all involved trapping the witch in some fashion.  My girlfriend – a non-gamer who enjoys the game as well – beat it entirely differently.  That’s the raw brilliance of the game, the replayability is limited only by imagination.  Okay, I’ll be honest, your vocabulary is more important.  You can always read the dictionary if you do not possess the vocab chops.

Scribblenauts is a marvelous delight.  It’s simple to understand, cute, rewarding and yet it manages to tease the brain thanks to quirky level design.  We’d still be playing through the various modes right now if it wasn’t for one simple thing, the controls.

5th Cell’s innovation is hurt by the stylus control system. Creating and moving around items is a breeze, but interacting with them is not.  The gaffe is only partly due to the developer.  It’s more than likely that the Nintendo DS’s touchscreen does not possess a high enough resolution to make selection of the avatar or a newly created item as easy as it should be.  Too many times I died because the stylus told Maxwell to dive into a pit of lava, instead of highlighting the bridge.

It’s these kind of fouls ups that caused my girlfriend to quickly abandon a game.  One that she declared as “fun” and raved about to friends and family.  That’s pretty much more praise than I, a gamer with a ravenous appetite, could ever levy on the title.  Every DS player with a mind for puzzles should check Scribblenauts out.  You’ll be shocked at how many people around you become interested in the game.  Tell your Scrabble-loving Grandmother to get her own DS.

I haven’t made it through all 220 levels yet – the frustrating controls force me to abandon the game every week – but I do plan on it.

Oh, and before I go.  The game has been so successful that 5th Cell has backed off on its assertion that it was done with DS development.  Scribblenauts 2 is on slate for a DS release this fall.  More words, adjectives and improved controls.  Bring it.