Scribblenauts Unlimited

Scribblenauts is a series of games with the premise that you can write in almost anything, and the game will make it manifest. Scribblenauts Unlimited is not my first foray into the series, I bought the original game on the Nintendo DS. I really liked the concept, but I found the execution to be quite clunky, and never pushed through my lack of enthusiasm to finish the game. I only grabbed this new edition because it was part of a humble bundle. But I was interested to see how the game had evolved over the years.

Let's start with how the basic premise of Scribblenauts. Basically you play as a boy named Maxwell who has a magic notebook, where anything he writes in it comes to life. You go around solving problems and earning stars for some reason. So, to take an example from the game, a muddy pig needs cleaning. You could write “hose” or “brush” or “bath” and then use those items on the pig. Whatever you can dream up (aside from copyright material) should be available, so you can really get inventive on how you want to solve your problems. Unfortunately, a lot of the puzzles seem to lack in imagination. There's only so many ways to wash a pig, after all. But anyway, that's the basic idea behind the game.

From what I could see, Scribblenauts Unlimited had added two new things of interest since the first game I'd picked up. I'll start with the positive: adjectives. Now, instead of just writing “dog”, you could write “giant red dog” and Clifford would come to life in front of you. It really added extra layers of ideas for how to solve puzzles. One such instance was when I met a hungry man, who was troubled by a broken vending machine. Now, I could have summoned a mechanic to fix the vending machine, but instead I just changed the adjective on the man to “full” and his problem was solved. So, that was a cool addition. The game definitely gets a tick for that.

The second addition is definitely not a tick. In the decade or so since Scribblenauts came out, it seemed it was time for some more female representation. Maxwell, the male main character of the series, was now being joined by his sister Lily! How nice. Oh, except in the intro movie she gets trapped in stone by an evil spell...oh, looks like you can't play as her after all, she's just there to be rescued. It just seems...mean-spirited. Like, female players asked for a girl character and some cartoonishly misogynistic creative director said “Oh the girls want a female character? I'll GIVE them a female character!”

Now, maybe you're thinking, “hang on, just because they introduced a girl character who needs rescuing doesn't mean they're sexist. It could be a coincidence, or at least unintentional.” And yes, it could have just been an oversight, where nobody asked “Wait, what message is this sending?”

...except for one thing. See, Max and Lily come from a big family. A ridiculously big family. They have 40 siblings, to be exact. And throughout the game you unlock each of these siblings as playable characters. So, it doesn't really matter that you don't get to play as Lily, right? Since there are all those other female options to play as...right?

Can you guess where I'm going with this? I couldn't. I had to double, and then triple check. See, it turns out, Max and Lily have 40 BROTHERS and no other sisters. That means you can play as 41 boys, and the one girl gets turned to stone. I honestly don't know what message they could possibly be trying to send to girl players other than “Fuck you.” It's just deliberate exclusion at that point.

So, the game absolutely gets a thumbs down from me for that alone. But let's say you don't give a shit about women, and just want to know about the quality of gameplay. Judging the game purely on those merits, I have to say, it's still not good. Sadly the puzzles are just really basic, for the most part. It seems pretty squarely aimed at kids, as the level of difficulty is along the lines of “I need 3 sharp objects” or “help me scare off this bee” and after a while you stop bothering trying to come up with clever ways to solve the puzzles when you can just write “spider” and collect your star and leave. Despite the easy difficulty, I just couldn't get all the way through. It just grew tiresome. Which is a real shame, because you know a lot of people must have gone to a lot of effort to make a game where you can write in almost any word and make it come to life. 0.5/5 stars.