Scribblenauts gives most people some truly transcendant moments of emergent gameplay – that’s what makes the game so great. This is the bright side of Scribblenauts – when you first realize that an elephant is afraid of a mouse or that a mirror really will cause medusa to turn to stone. But Scribblenauts also has a dark side, that being the movement controls and poor physics engine. For these reasons, Scribblenauts is one of the most frustrating games I’ve played in a while.
Let’s look at a few examples. On one level, there’s a starite dangling by a rope over a pit of lava, and between you and it is a tripwire that drops the starite into the lava. After many failed attempts to float something on or above the lava, I tied a chain to the starite and tried chaining it to different heavy objects to keep it from falling into the lava: a safe, an armoire… none stopped it. So I figured on trying something that moves. I chained it to a scooter and sat at the wheel, but that didn’t work because I had to get off the scooter to trip the tripwire. I ended up chaining the starite to a tiger and putting a ribeye steak in front of it. When I broke the tripwire, the tiger ran forward to the steak, puling the starite along. Yay! I ran up to get the starite, and Maxwell kicked it into the lava instead of picking it up. Noooooo! After all that! Aargh! The guys over at 4 Player Podcast have a great conversation about these same frustrations.
This is the dark side of Scribblenauts. It can crush your soul when you go through so much to get the Starite and then fail due to stupid movement controls. Ropes and chains are very useful, but angling them properly when attaching them can be an exercise in frustration. More often than not, some part of the chain will end up positioned inside a wall in such a way that you can’t drop them. And you can only move the ends – not the center. If you’ve got the chain attached to something, then you’ll move the whole mess. Detaching the objects can be even harder.
Perhaps one way to minimize the irritation of Scribblenauts physics is to view it as cartoon-like. A handheld magnet can fling a huge steel box as if it were a soccer ball. A fan will propel a mac truck. These things can be useful once you realize what’s happening.
The game is fun – don’t get me wrong. But there’s certainly a lot of frustration.
