Adventure Gamers has just posted a feature I wrote about Scribblenauts, a unique game that released this fall for Nintendo DS.
I don’t really remember the big uproar Scribblenauts received at E3 this year. I was closed up in a small meeting room most of the time demoing Telltale’s Tales of Monkey Island, which had made a surprise appearance at the show, to the shock and amazement of pretty much everyone. (The fourth episode releases today, btw!) But when I returned to reality at the end of the week, I started hearing about this incredible game—positioned as an “emergent” game by its developers, 5th Cell— that would allow the player to conjure up any object they could think of, to solve puzzles. It sounded like Harold and the Purple Crayon meets Zork meets a game I can play lying on the couch (which is my favorite type these days), and my interest was piqued.
At Comic-Con and PAX I tried to get a look at Scribblenauts, but at both shows the crowd around the demo kiosk was so thick, I decided to be patient and wait for the release—which I would devour as soon as I possibly could. So of course when Adventure Gamers offered me the opportunity to cover the game, I jumped for it. (I even shelled out my own money since a review copy wasn’t available—that’s dedication!)
The game arrived in the mail while my parents were visiting, and thinking my mom might be as intrigued by the unusual premise as everyone else in the world seemed to be, I started playing it with her. We got through the tutorial, then the first few stages, then we hit a stage where the instructions were utterly vague. Maxwell was at the beginning of some sort of race, and we had to figure out how to speed him down the ramp so he could perform a jump and cross the finish line. We tried a bicycle, then a motorcycle. Rather than speeding gracefully down the ramp, he slowed down until he did a somersault and anticlimactically came to rest before hitting the jump. We tried sprinkling motor oil on the track to make it slippery. We tried equipping Maxwell with a jet pack. After a bit of tinkering, my mother turned to me and said, “Do you think this is fun?” She clearly didn’t.
I picked it up again later that night, flying solo this time. I finally managed to win that race but I have no idea how. A few stages later, I got some giddy pleasure out of knocking down a stack of milk bottles by dropping a hippopotamus on them and thought maybe that confusing level had been a fluke. Maybe I’d get used to the hard-to-handle controls. Maybe after a bit more time, I’d understand what made this game so brilliant, it had the press all aflutter at E3 and beyond.
by Deborah Eisenberg, had just sold out.* The woman behind the counter offered to order it for me, but since this is the first book we’ll be discussing and I need to finish it by next Thursday, I said no thanks, I’d look elsewhere.
. I’m happy with how they turned out and am planning to write a tutorial in the near future showing how to make them yourself, so stay tuned for that.
Emily is a freelance writer, miniaturist, and adventure game enthusiast.
