E3 2009: Scribblenauts Hands On

by: Chuck - posted: 6/2/2009 11:50:00 PM

The great thing about E3 is that you usually find one unique and cool game that you hadn't heard of before the show.  While it's only the first day it looks like Scribblenauts is going to be that game for me this year.  The concept of the DS game is fairly simple.  You play Maxwell a little dude who's trying to collect starites from across a series of levels.  The levels are broken into two types, puzzle levels (where the starite is shown and you have to figure out how to get to it) and action levels (the starite is hidden and you have to find it).  I know this sounds simple but the genius is in the execution.

The trick to the game is that you don't have pre-set objects in the game world to solve the problems but rather you pull up a notebook and type in something you want to use to solve the puzzle.  That's right, anything you want to type in as the game has a library of 10,000 objects for you to use in the game.  That's right, if you can think it you can use it to solve the game. 

The first level I played had a beached whale that needed to go back into the water.  To do that I typed in hockey stick and then used a hockey stick to knock the whale back into the ocean.  This kind of horrified the demo person as he said that most people will bring in a bulldozer to push the whale into the water or dig underneath him with a shovel to slide him back into the water (the game is physics based).  You can also summon other fun things like atom bombs, axes, cars, helicopters, and other things that gently push the game into the emergent/sandbox category.

Again it sounds simple but that game is a ton of fun to play as you have an amazing amount of freedom in how you try to solve the puzzles.  The version on the floor still had a few rough edges but even in it's current format it's one of the most creative games I've seen in a while.  Look for the game in stores this fall.