When you play the Scribblenauts, it feels extremely simple, but the simplicity comes from the game's amazingly complicated engine that attempts to emulate reality so that the game's rules are closer to the rules of real life. One of the more impressive aspects of the game's engine is the artificial intelligence. Intelligent objects like people, animals and monsters, will display a talk bubble over their head indicating a certain emotion. That emotion decides their current AI-pattern, but their emotion can change based on the circumstances. An character in an 'aggressive' mood will attack your character and ultimately kill them, causing you to fail the level. Other moods include things like fear, sleepiness, hunger, protectiveness and kleptomania. They aren't so much single AI patterns as they are categories of AI patterns; different characters characters can be hungry for different kinds of objects, be obsessed with stealing different kinds of objects, or have different standards for entering an aggressive mood.

There's also an elaborately life-like physics system to match the life-like artificial intelligence. The game calculates things like weight, shape, structural integrity, stickiness, and inertia of all kinds of interacting objects in real time in such a way that makes things move in the way you'd expect them to move. In fact, the physics are so much closer to real life physics than video game physics that it'll often trip you up. Want to pull a tree out of the ground? You can tie one end of a rope around the trunk and then tie the other end to a biplane and yank it out of the ground. Wacky solutions to problems to ordinary problems using rules similar to the rules of reality is often difficult to wrap your head around, but that's most of the fun of the game.

In addition to the physics engines and artificial intelligence, there's also a huge web of variables and exceptions tied to each object. Objects all seem to have an HP value, and anything can be destroyed if hit enough by something else. But they also have certain hidden values - for instance, dogs will chase after cats, balloons will lift things up and vacuum cleaners will suck things in. But then there's also all these cool trick combinations, for example, holding a pencil and interacting with a paper will turn the paper into a portrait, or putting a corpse into an electric chair will create a zombie (which, sadly, is one of my favorite tricks, and one of the few sure-fire ways to crash my DSi). The exceptions to the standard rules are so common that they make every item feel unique. I was worried for a while that the objects would boil down to slight variations on certain category (weapons, vehicles, food, etc) but it seems like almost every other item has some unique hidden property.

There are over 220 stages, divided into equal part 'action' stages and 'puzzle' stages. Action stages simply require you to touch the goal, an object called Starite, whereas 'puzzle' stages require you to solve a problem to earn your Starite. The puzzle stages are almost always more interesting than the action stages, as most action stages can usually be hacked through with enough destruction, whereas the puzzle stages are more like word problem brain teasers. Puzzles include things like "Protect the picnic food without harming the ants" or "Knock over all the milk bottles without cheating or using guns," and the goal is to complete them using a minimal number of items, ideally under the par (like in golf).

Beating a stage the first time is usually easy, but when you replay it the second time, it'll be in "advanced mode" where you have to beat the same stage three times in a row, without reusing words from your previous attempts. It sounds like it'd be boring, but it's the single most entertaining aspect of the game. Because usually the first solution that comes to mind feels like the only solution, and it forces you to think outside the box. If the mission is to "chop down a tree" you'd likely use an axe the first time. But the second and third time you're not allowed to use the word 'axe', so you have to come up with something else. A chainsaw? A bulldozer? A beaver? A black hole? The lateral thinking element makes it fun; it forces you to dig deep down into your vocabulary and consider every word and object you could possibly think of in a new light. It's surprisingly satisfying.

Controls
The controls in Scribblenauts take a lot of getting used to. The protagonist moves by dragging the stylus around the background, and jumps by dragging the stylus upwards across his body. Items that you've summoned yourself can be dragged around with the stylus too, and you can tap items that already exist to interact with them. The D-Pad and face buttons are used to move the camera, and the L and R buttons can be used to rotate a selected object. This system only really works well when things are spaced apart in a certain way; if things are too close, you'll often touch the wrong thing, and if things are too far you have to deal with panning the camera which really slows you down. The controls work well enough to not be annoying, but just barely.

Level Editor
The level editor is one of the biggest letdowns in Scribblenauts. You can only make action levels, not puzzle levels, which is understandable given how complicated the programming for puzzle levels must be. But the lame part is that you can't even make action levels as good as the pre-made action levels, because several key ingredients are missing.

First of all, you can't actually attach anything to the walls, ceilings, or floors. Any structures you build will be all bendy like the towers in World of Goo and eventually fall apart. You can weigh things down by gluing them to heavy or stationary objects (Hint: The Monolith is pretty sturdy) but it's hard to make anything solid. Also, certain devices that seem like they were made for the level editor, such as color-coded switches and doors, work in pre-made levels but are non-functional in levels you make in the level editor.

The biggest mistake in the level editor (and probably the whole game) is the music selector tool. You can buy songs from the game's store on the cheap (I actually bought all of them all at once) and they're about 40 similar-sounding songs that only have track numbers--no titles. In the level editor, you can select from a track number, but you can't actually hear the song as a preview (nor can you hear it when testing the level) so there's no way to know what song belongs to what track number without going into the sound test and listening to them one-by-one, then memorizing the number to the song you want to use, then going back into the level editor and selecting that song. It's just really terribly executed.

There's really not much you can do here in terms of gameplay, and you're basically just drawing pictures. It's still somehow fun. Despite being the crashiest part of the game, I spent a long time in there trying to make certain themed levels. I made a Lost-themed level where a jet, occupied by man, a woman, and an old man, towing a coffin (which contained the Starite) crash on a desert island. I also spent a long time making a level that recapped season 11 of Big Brother (don't judge me, it was finale night!) which I play through in this YouTube video:

It was fun, but I probably won't make another one. With a more polish and a Little Big Planet-like download/upload center, it could've been amazing. It's really the biggest missed opportunity in the game.

Graphics and Sound
There's not much to say about the graphics or sound in Scribblenauts. They both took one good idea and ran with it. Everything looks like a rough, hand-made paper doll, which is cleverly fitting to the inexact nature of the gameplay; you'll never stress out about not being able to get a bunch of squares to line up correctly within the wiggly physics engine, because there are very few right angles in the first place. The music is basically a single catchy jingle remixed about 50 different times. It somehow never feels repetitive, but it also never really blows you away.

Story
There is almost no story in Scribblenauts, which makes the handful of original story-like elements more charming. We know that the protagonist is named Maxwell and that he wears a rooster hat and collects Starite, but we don't know much else. Though there's really no scripted narrative in Scribblenauts, you will definitely watch stories unfold and take them with you. But the stories happen as a result of your choices. For example, in one stage I was supposed to use a stork to deliver a baby to it's parents; not being a fan of 'natural births' I decided instead to use a rope to tie the baby to a midwife and have her drag the kid to the parents--and the parents were thrilled! But this scenario only happened because of my own personal input, and you'll find most of the more memorable moments in Scribblenauts are the same way.

Overall Scribblenauts is an amazing game that you really should experience for yourself. Almost everything the game does is so ambitious and well executed that its few flaws (such as the lame level editor) hardly take away from its overall value. It's definitely worth the price of admission. And for DSi users with no access to a regular DS, I'd recommend renting or borrowing the game first to see if you're comfortable with the frequency of the crashes, and then decide if it's worth buying. Even though I've been playing mine on a DSi, I still feel it's worth the trouble, but others may not be so patient.

8 out of 10