Summary
Very few gaming series can claim that they introduced a wholly original idea to the table; even the likes of Mario and Zelda were simply polishing, to a sheen, formulae that had existed for years prior. But Scribblenauts is one such series. There’d never been anything like it beforehand, and there probably won’t ever be again.
You’re plopped into the rooster-hatted shoes of Maxwell, who’s got himself a magic pencil that can create any noun or adjective that comes to mind. Type it in, and voila: there it is, in the game world, ready to help with combat and puzzles. Just how do all of these wordy adventures stack up?
Just a quick note: for this list, we’re countingonly mainline entries in the franchise, published for consoles by WB Games.Any mobile spinoffs or browser games don’t make the cut – and frankly, it’d be a race to the bottom if we included them.
5Scribblenauts Showdown
Once You Hit The Party Games, It’s All Over
After allowing the series to lie dormant for half a decade, WB Games elected to return to the Scribblenauts well in the form of 2018’s Scribblenauts Showdown. On paper, it’s got all the usual trappings of the brand: bright visuals, offbeat humour, a funky soundtrack, and an expansive dictionary of words to manifest. Alas, it’s done in by one fatal flaw: it’s a party game.
Sure, there’s a ‘Sandbox’ mode with a meager handful of environments – sparsely populated with NPCs who offer basic puzzles to solve – but that can be wrapped up within an hour. The meat of the experience is a half-baked Mario Party clone, the gimmick being you must spawn the objects to be used in the minigames.
Certain items just have a blatant advantage over others (why would you ever spawn ‘sword’ for the fencing minigame when ‘nuke’ is accepted and ends things immediately?), suggesting they didn’t think the mechanic through all that well. It takes more time to painstakingly type out your preferred phrase than it does to actually play the round.
Add in the fact that the minigames themselves inspire little imagination - eating ice cream, pulling ropes, cleaning windows - and you have an absolute shoe-in for the bottom spot.
4Scribblenauts
The Original, But Far From The Best
When WB first announced the original DS Scribblenauts, the media attention it received was nothing short of staggering. Everyone at E3 that year wanted to give this novel concept a try, and it reached the point where the devs (in cunning fashion) effectively turned it into a farmed-out beta test, holding ‘Stump the Dictionary’ contests to enable them to identify words they’d forgotten to include.
Many years down the line, however, the first Scribblenauts has been dramatically outshone by its follow-ups, all of which refine its basic foundation. You can tell they were taking an iron to some kinks here, much like how Maxwell would likely take some Tippex to his notebook if he were to misplace the ‘n’ in ‘Santa’.
The platforming is really ropey, and reliant on Maxwell auto-jumping – since he’s controlled entirely with the stylus and not the D-pad sitting right there on the DS.
Stages are less to do with puzzles, and more action-oriented; Starites will sit just out of reach (or behind a breakable wall), but otherwise unguarded, meaning that ‘gun’ or ‘jetpack’ can safely dispatch more than half the game’s challenges. It’s funny how having access to the entire English language can overwhelm you and make you fall back on the staples.
There are some really meta inclusions in the Scribblenauts dictionary. Inputting ‘this game’ will give you exactly that: a copy of the DS cartridge (which can also, somewhat smugly, be created with the phrases ‘perfection’ and ‘best game ever’). All the developers can be summoned, too.
Other oddities include the Neogaf logo, and the fact that typing ‘virgin’ spawns a gamer. This mean-spirited gag in particular received complaints, so it was removed for all sequels.
All told, Scribblenauts deserves credit for getting the ball rolling; but it’s best left behind as a curiosity nowadays, as it wouldn’t take long for it to be improved upon.
3Scribblenauts Unmasked
Notebooks Meet Comic Books
After the smashing sales of Scribblenauts Unlimited, WB spied an opportunity to meld Maxwell. with one of its largest properties: the ever-expanding cast of the DC Comics universe. It sounds like a terrible, corporate-mandated idea, but the game’s intro adequately spells out how the crossover occurs. Maxwell’s sister Lily’s globe, which can teleport its user anywhere, comes into contact with a copy of a Batman comic… and that’s all it takes.
Unmasked’s principal ‘win’ is its utility as a comprehensive DC Comics database. Short of the fan wiki, you’re not going to find a more expansive, trivia-filled library of DC content than this; characters, objects, locations, and more are all included, complete with a list of media they were in, and can be summoned up at will. There are some deep cuts here – remember Larfleeze? Or Bat-Cow? Mr. Mxyzptlk, maybe?
The package stumbles when it comes to the game part of the game. Rather than the carefully structured brainteasers of prior installments, Unmasked’s maps and tasks are randomly generated, which rarely bodes well for a puzzler.
Oftentimes you spawn in and the NPC you require for one mission has been killed by a hostile associated with another, or a puzzle is instantly solved by a nearby object; making the whole thing a confusing mess to get through.
Unmasked gets top points for its fidelity to DC – spawn in any hero and they’ll beat up their designated villains, for instance – but it wasn’t worth sacrificing the Scribblenauts identity for.
2Super Scribblenauts
Even The Title Knows It’s Superior
Scribblenauts received major props for the execution of its head-spinning concept, but there was no denying the fact there was still much work to be done. Super Scribblenauts, which arrived a mere year after the first, went out of its way to address all the quibbles critics had with Maxwell’s maiden voyage, and it’s the definitive Scribblenauts experience on the OG DS.
Chief among the improvements is that Maxwell’s movement is now bound to the D-pad and face buttons, so you can actually maneuver him like something not a million miles away from a videogame character.
The overreliance on action stages has likewise been dialled back – indeed, there are some levels where Maxwell won’t need to move at all to nab the Starite, asking that you use your brains rather than your brawn. Bazookas and helicopters will only get you so far this time.
Adjectives are also tossed into the mix for the first time in the series, so for all you that wanted to pit ‘colossal rainbow Cthulhu’ against ‘bouncing steel Nyan Cat’ (for he, and many other outdated memes, made it into the dictionary), by all means, have at it.
There’s as much fun to be had in the open sandbox, testing out what various items do, as there is in solving the puzzles. Super Scribblenauts is a bonafide gem – but it’s still not the best Maxwell has to offer.
1Scribblenauts Unlimited
And ‘Unlimited’ Is Right, Too
The third time isn’t always the charm, but it certainly is in Maxwell’s case. Scribblenauts Unlimited is a joyous treat that feels like the ultimate culmination of a three-step creative journey, trimming all the fat and distilling the gameplay down to its rawest, most fun form. Bursting with content and effortlessly charming, it’s a must-play for all ages.
In a series first, Unlimited comes complete with a fleshed-out backstory and reasoning for all your scribbling escapades. Lily becomes cursed by an evil wizard, and is slowly turning to rock, reversible only by Starites that appear when Maxwell does good deeds for folk.
In his quest to spare his granite sibling, he’ll visit arid deserts, jungles teeming with dinosaurs, ancient volcanoes, state penitentiaries, and even the most dangerous place of all: the local city centre.
As you might have noticed, the 3DS, Wii U, and Switch versions of Scribblenauts Unlimited include cameos from various Nintendo characters.
Items and heroes from Mario, Zelda, and a handful of other series can be spawned, and they behave as you’d expect. The invincible Starman is an easy winning ticket when you get into scrapes.
There’s just no telling what wacky locale you’ll end up in next, and each one functions as its own sandbox, a la Super Scribblenauts. You can either goof off, or actually get down to puzzling, which every area has a generous helping of. They’re all well-thought-through missions, unlike Unmasked’s RNG, and the dripfeed of variety never ceases until the credits roll.
In a nutshell, Unlimited represents the pinnacle of the series – and it was sadly all downhill from there. Though its magic has never been recaptured, it remains a modern creative classic, and is available on every platform under the sun, to boot.
