And to great extents it does. Scribblenauts is a puzzle game developed by 5th Cell Games, the same company responsible for creating the Drawn to Life series of titles. The premise is simple: Prompted with puzzles, you, controlling a rooster hat-clad bot named Maxwell, are charged with the task of solving them. How you do this is entirely up to you. One challenge, for example, is to get a wayward giraffe back to the zoo. Solving this puzzle seems simple enough except for the fact that what stands between you and your goal is a giant pit. What do you do?
Why, you summon a helicopter, of course. The central gameplay mechanic to Scribblenauts is Maxwell’s notepad, which, by writing a specified word in it, summons anything the player can imagine. So we type in ‘helicopter,’ causing one to appear. Next, we type in ‘rope,’ because we are going to need a way to attach the giraffe to the helicopter. Once our girffe and helicopter are linked, we place Maxwell in the helicopter and fly the giraffe back home. Problem solve.
At Scribblenaut’s core is the simple philosophy: “Write Everything, Solve Anything.” And while that promise might at first glance seem like an impossible one to keep, the developers came pretty damn close. 5th Cell created the title with emergent gameplay in mind. Emergent games are defined by their focus on the imagination of the player: Developers merely create the world and the pieces, giving players (mostly) free reign with what they would like to do with them. Emergent gameplay, recalled popularly in titles like The Sims, is seen by many developers as being the future of video games — and we can certainly see why that’s the case: Games like Scribblenauts offer players an unparalleled gaming experience, a sandbox of options where the only limitation is your vocabulary.
Floating the background of Scribblenauts is Objectnaut, a object system built from the ground up for the title. To understand it, we can look at one particular object, say, a cat. The object “cat,” in this case, is defined in the Objectnaut system as, for one, a feline, and, more largely, an animal. It’s also defined in regards to its relationship with other animals, so summoning a cat will cause it to chase mice, eat fish and get chased by dogs. Summoning catnip causes the cat, after consuming it, to fall asleep. All of these properties and relationships are built into the title, making for an unfathomably robust object system that contains an entire universe of nouns.
It’s here that Scribblenauts gleans much of its enjoyment. 5th Cell really did program the whole world into this title, often to extremely precise extents. Inputting different breeds of cat, for instance — burmese, birman, bombay, etc — will summon cats of different colors and not the expected stock cat sprite. This level of detail, which, at times almost seems absurd, was the main selling point of the title, and the developers fulfilled their promise in very real, amazing ways.
Where Scibblenauts suffers, however, is as a game. The title inexplicably fails to follow what is likely the Golden Rule of game design, which stipulates that a player should have complete and precise control over the character he or she controls. Because Maxwell is controlled via the Nintendo DS’s touch screen, players will frequently find themselves accidentally guiding Maxwell into pits or directly into the range of aggressive creatures. These frequent mishaps oftentimes create for a very frustrating experience and it is somewhat disheartening that 5th Cell did not do a better job with this element of the title.
There are other negative considerations as well. Scribblenauts, for better or for worse, requires an extreme deal of patience, and not due solely to its finicky control scheme. The puzzles themselves take some time to solve, and there are many times where the game’s objects do not function as accurately or completely as players might like. (Lion tamers can’t tame tigers?) It’s a tough experience, one that seems challenging and potentially wonderful at first, but also one that quite rapidly shifts to anger and vexation.
And it’s these experiences that make Scribblenauts not so great as a game. It’s obvious that much of the effort in creating the title went into fleshing out its expansive item catalog; likewise, it is quite obvious that the faulty gameplay elements emerged from slightly less attention being paid to those aspects of the game. It’s disappointing, largely because Scribblenauts, from its inception, should have been the perfect game.
Imaginative gamers, however, are likely to see past these things. Despite the game’s faults, Scribblenauts still remains a brilliantly-imagined, slightly flawed gem of a game, unparalleled in its vision but stemmed in the seamlessness of its execution.