Backhand of Justice

Scribblenauts was one of my most anticipated games this year. Every time I heard about it, my mind wildly devised increasingly Rube Goldberg-esque solutions to imagined problems. Unfortunately, Scribblenauts is not at all the game I was expecting, and in reality it falls massively short of its admittedly brilliant concept.

I must admit that this won’t technically be a review. While I will get into what Scribblenauts did right and wrong, I will do so briefly as I did not complete the game and technically don’t want to review a game when I haven’t seen all the content.

For reference, I completed the first half of both the puzzle and action worlds and so this article is relevant only to that content. Maybe the game radically changes at the halfway mark. Somehow I doubt that’s the case.

Is there such a thing as being too ambitious?

Before I even get into the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ section of this review, I first want to discuss if creativity for the hell of it is a good thing. There is a difference between over promising and under delivering such as what Peter Molyneux does with his games, and just having a flawed concept.

Black and White and Fable promised a lot of things that were left out of their respective final products, but in the place of those mechanics was a limited yet playable experience. Scribblenauts, on the other hand, should have iterated during development and understood that their game concept simply wasn’t working and although it sounded fun was not much fun to play.

Pushing the creative envelope should be rewarded, but within reason. Scribblenauts is similar to an open world game in that you have to give good structure to the sandbox. A game like InFamous or GTA IV doesn’t just create a world and insert you into it to create your own fun, they give you strict goals that exploit the illusion of freedom while actually tightly structuring your experience.

Wandering around in Liberty City is fun because it’s an escape from the goals of the game but if that was the whole game most would feel shortchanged. 

The hidden Liberty City levels in Scribblenauts are epic in scale

Scribblenauts, on the other hand, is merely a sandbox. The game is pasted over the top and is wafer thin. It doesn’t tell you what to do other than a boring tutorial and a few small tooltip hints. Its rules aren’t self-evident and nothing behaves as personal experience would suggest. As a result, the player frequently finds themselves lost in a maze of confusing design.

What Went Right

Concept: Scribblenauts has a great idea. On paper it should have been a great game. I am a firm believer that the increasing cost of AAA games is going to squeeze creativity out of the industry. While being on a handheld and therefore having lower development costs helps, Scribblenauts is still something of a call to arms to other developers. 5^th Cell came up with an idea so outrageous that nobody thought it would be possible, and they still pushed ahead and released it. That is a great example.

Unfortunately this is the only positive I can come up with.

You can knock the Starite down with a baseball! Or create a badger to cut down the tree! You can do ANYTHING (as long as it's one of those two things)

What Were They Thinking?

Controls: I’m not going to dwell on these. Plenty of reviews have picked this out as their chief criticism of the game. While they are fiddly, I didn’t think they were that bad. This is probably because I had so many larger and more design-centric criticisms of Scribblenauts.

Execution: You’ll notice this is a broad topic. That’s because there’s so much wrong with the way 5^th Cell executed on the concept of ‘create anything, solve everything.’ Simply put, very little in this game behaves as you would expect, and while you can create anything, none of it is much fun or in-depth. It’s no good to be able to create a bridge if it doesn’t actually do what it’s supposed to.

I will cite a few examples here to give you an idea of what I’m talking about. One of the very early action levels has you trying to get past a tornado. First, I tried the brute force approach: create a tank and drive through the tornado. Not only did this not work, but the tornado didn’t even act like a tornado; it bounced me and anything else that touched it backwards, no matter how large an object it was dealing with. I assume limitations of the engine forced them to use these bouncing physics, but it certainly hurts the puzzle-solving aspect of the game. By the end I wasn’t even sure that I was dealing with a tornado and maybe I’d missed the entire concept of the puzzle.

In another level, I needed to collect a dinosaur egg for a caveman because he wanted a toasty omelette. It was being guarded by an older, hostile dinosaur. For some reason, whenever I killed the guardian, the egg hatched and the baby dino attacked me, causing me to lose the level. The ‘stun gun’ I summoned to subdue the Guardosaur™ merely enraged him and caused him to attack me. Flying over his head and picking up the egg with a rope caused the egg to hatch, costing me the level. In the end, I forgot about the egg entirely and summoned a 2^nd dinosaur egg for the caveman, ‘solving’ the puzzle.

Nothing in this game acts the way you’d expect. Many critics are lauding the fun of sitting on the title screen and making fantasy beasts battle each other. Testing whether Einstein on a skateboard with a shotgun can kill Cthulu is fun for about 20 minutes. If that is what is enticint to you about Scribblenauts, rent the game or find a demo of it in a store and go wild.

Crabs of Unusual Size? I don't think they exist

Puzzles: The puzzle design in this game is flawed. The whole appeal of the game’s concept is to create increasingly ridiculous situations. The game, on the other hand, encourages using the fewest objects in each puzzle with greater rewards. This forces you to reuse the most useful things like wings and guns, instead of being creative. In addition, the puzzles aren’t set up where you have to overcome obstacles. Instead, they are merely searches for the ‘key item’ that satisfies the game. While there are mutiple solutions to most problems, they rarely involve the cover example of going back in time to find a T-Rex you can ride.

Verdict

I bought this game after hearing the reviews were negative to mixed because I wanted to support 5^th Cell. I honestly believe that they can create something great, and daring developers are too few and far between. That being said, this game was too ambitious for their development team, their time restrictions and their hardware limitations. 

The idea is fascinating and everybody should experience it first hand, but if you can, find a friend who has a copy. Unless you’re buying it as contribution to the creative brain trust at 5th cell, it’s not worth your money.