No longer are you asked to invent three possible solutions to a given problem: most of the time a single noun or an adjective will suffice. This is Scribblenauts Unlimited at its very best, where experiments have unplanned and often hilarious consequences, but the easygoing structure of the game means that a lot of this silly fun can be all too easy to miss. Two birds rather fortuitously killed with one stone: cue much laughter from father and son. The subsequent explosion blew up the chain, freeing the brother and unlocking him as a playable character. As I swam down to see where it had landed, I noticed it was resting immediately next to an immovable safe tied to the foot of one of Maxwell’s brothers (who you’re tasked with rescuing through the campaign). As I attempted to swim away, I inadvertently nudged the barrel from its rocky resting place, where it plummeted towards the seabed. Disappointingly, it didn’t conform to gaming tradition by turning red and spawning several henchmen to crouch behind it, but instead began to beep, as if a proximity mine was inside. After a couple of failed experiments, my son suggested we add an adjective to the nearest barrel: explosive. I was playing one of the earlier levels with my seven-year-old son, and one of the side-missions on the level (each stage commonly has one or two main objectives and ten or so brief asides) asked us to clean an area of polluted water where several barrels of toxic waste lay. In some ways, however, that doesn’t matter: Scribblenauts Unlimited may not be a great game, but it’s a wonderful, emergent plaything, and particularly worthwhile if you belong to that growing audience of gamers with young children. With Scribblenauts Unlimited, I’ve finally come to the realisation that it may not be possible to make a brilliant game from such an ambitious concept: there are simply too many variables involved, the game’s gargantuan dictionary meaning any interactions are necessarily rudimentary.
The idea of Scribblenauts is ingenious – think of any object, type in its name, and it appears in the game world – but so far the execution has been lacking.