Scribblenauts

2026-04-25
Mechanically, Maxwell is fucked from the start. Tap on the screen and there Maxwell goes. If there's a gap or a step he will automatically jump. Usually. Kind of. Even with my well-honed, Millennial-ass DS-touchscreen skills I'd say at best Maxwell's movement is unreliable. Now add in the fact that many levels have you escorting NPC characters--usually by tying a rope (or handcuffs if that's your jam, hombre) to them and then to Maxwell--who are bound by the same unreliable movement, through levels full of things that will kill them, failing the run, and you have a proper dung pie.

Maxwell's problem is that he's stuck inside Scribblenauts, an incredible emergent sandbox glued to a wet tissue of a puzzle game. Even when it's not insubstantial, the grotesque cyclopean physics and logic fall apart when you poke them.

A late-game puzzle asked me to match 6 items to 6 doors. This puzzle like many in Scribblenauts presents a level of challenge suitable for a hemispherectomy patient on Dilaudid: give the bone to the dog, the milk to the cat, the dog tags to the soldier. And yet it takes three minutes to complete. We're a hundred puzzles into the game and they still think it's challenging to pick up an item and carry it up a floor when there aren't stairs. I let out a sigh and type "Jetpack" for the millionth time and traipse the milk up to the cat. Some items Maxwell can't pick up so it's yet again time to rope our twitchy protagonist to the item and have him seizure his way through the level. I drop off the last item, gather my Starite reward, and my eyes glaze over as the game penalizes me for taking so long.

I think "It’s just a hiccup". Usually after a bad puzzle I get an ok one. I know I'm wrong when I look at what they've given me for the penultimate puzzle in the game. On the left side of the screen a cat and fireman, on the right a dalmatian and an old woman. "Get the right pet to the right owner!". I rope the feline over, and the dog kills the cat. Great. I put a cage on the dog. He walks through the cage and kills the cat. Ok. I spawn a dog house near the dog. He attacks and kills the old woman. Uhhhhhh okayyyy. I spawn tranquilizers and the old woman eats them, falling asleep. I spawn another tranquilizer for the dog. The woman wakes up, eats the tranquilizer, falls asleep. Excellent. I spawn a tank and handcuff the dog to the tank to keep him at bay as I bring the cat. He pulls the tank and kills the cat. Sure. I spawn a gun and shoot the dog. Mission failed. I spawn a nuke and set it off. Everyone and everything on screen is annihilated. Mission failed.

Why did the dog who previously held no animosity for the old woman suddenly attack her when I spawned a dog house? I have no idea. But it's certainly fucking funny. It's also frustrating. That frustration is borne out of treating Scribblenauts as a puzzle game. Because half the time it barely even functions as a puzzle game and the rest of the time the puzzles are so braindead or trivially cheesed that you might as well be scribbling in a notebook at the end of the day. But really it's the scribbling that's the real fun on offer. After all, who wouldn't enjoy watching a dragon fight a kraken or see how many tranquilizers an old woman can take without dying?

PS: I've heard farts that sound better than Scribblenauts music. Genuinely one of the worst game soundtracks I've listened to in a very long time.