Scribblenauts has a lot of hype to live up to; even the box tells you that you can "Write anything, solve everything" in this puzzle game. You can’t write literally anything, but you can certainly come close and the result is one of the most creative games I’ve ever seen, the result of collaboration between WB and 5th Cell. Depending on who you ask, Scribblenauts is either an amazing sandbox to play in, or a collection of interesting puzzles. Its major game mechanic is its roughly 20,000 word (by the last counts I have heard, at least) dictionary; if it’s in that large group of words, you can summon it onto the stage and try to use it to solve the task at hand. All you have to do is write it or type it into the on-screen keyboard and it will appear.

Most stages revolve around the idea of getting to a Starite - a shiny, head-sized star - or solving a puzzle so that a Starite appears. Getting to an existing Starite might be as easy as summoning a jetpack and flying to it, or could involve an intricate set of ramps you jump by riding a sled, then summoning a chainsaw to cut down the tree in your way. Others are more based on word association and solutions to tasks completely unrelated to the Starite, such as finding objects that a police officer, fire man, and doctor would want to use in their work; give them what they need, and the Starite is yours. The wise guys out there are probably wondering what happens if you try to summon "Starite" or "Win"; you get a Starite piece this way, but not the one you need to complete the level.

Of course, there are a few other ways to win that are almost as easy as that idea. Certainly you can use these over and over, solving the majority of the game’s puzzles in the same basic way if you want. You can, but you’re cheating yourself out of a very creative experience if you do. Yes, you could just use a bug net to catch a butterfly... but isn’t it more clever to realize they like flowers, and then summon one to attract it to ground level for easy grabbing? The game rewards this sort of behavior, evaluating you on your ’style’; how interesting, detailed, and non-obvious your solution is. More interesting solutions yield more ’Ollars’, Scribblenauts’ currency you use to buy various unlockables. Likewise, going with certain themes in your solution can net a few awards as well; refusing to summon weapons to solve a puzzle is one such activity that gets you a titled award.

With the huge dictionary in this game, you’ll find that most things you can imagine are able to be summoned. There are some limits; most copyrighted things, specific people, profanities, sexual topics, and so on will yield nothing useful. And in some cases you’ll wind up summoning a ’close enough match’; trying to summon a katana gets you a curved sword, but it’s more like the odd merger of a falchion and scimitar than anything else. The game also usually ignores adjectives, so trying to summon ’climbing gear’ will instead net you just a gear; a piece of machinery. Thankfully the game is not this oddly literal on many puzzle solutions. One stage asked me to clean up all the trash in a park, along with the insects gathered around said refuse. Well, I didn’t so much clean it as cleanse it, summoning a flamethrower and burning everything in the stage. The game felt this was close enough, and gave me the Starite piece.

On the other hand, the variety of things you can summon is impressive even with the use of the aforementioned ’close enough matches.’ Most mundane objects are present and accounted for so if you want a motorcycle or baseball or rocket launcher, go for it. More extraordinary items can be used too, and there’s nothing stopping you from summoning a laser gun that you can shoot at enemies while flying around on a pegasus. Scribblenauts also shows an amusing level of attention to detail with mythological creatures; that pegasus will let your character ride on it with no problem, but a unicorn won’t since Maxwell is not a female. Little touches like these were nice to see, and show that the developers were thinking of a lot of things as they made the game.

While the game offers a decent tutorial and hundreds of puzzles to play through, that’s not all there is. You can also buy various things in the game’s store, and exchange created levels with friends (though sadly you’ll need to exchange Friend Codes for this). But best of all, the game’s start-up screen is a sandbox; there is no puzzle, just plenty of open room for you to summon items in and play with them.

In fact, said sandbox ate up a lot of my time. When some of my regular readers learned I was reviewing this game, they eagerly asked me to try all kinds of items. "Summon a Chupacabra!" "A nuke!" "A Longcat!" This continued for a while, and I ended up entertaining them for hours before I even got to the ’actual game.’ I’ll note that almost everything they thought of worked, including the Longcat and various other internet memes.

That said, Scribblenauts is not perfect. The controls are a little twitchy, and this can lead you to fail a puzzle on a few occasions. Likewise, it’s entirely possible to solve many puzzles through a mix of flight and applying some kind of force against whatever obstacles are in your way. There’s only so much you can do about the former, though the latter can be overcome by simply being more creative rather than taking the easy way out.

Despite its problems, Scribblenauts is a fascinating look at the future. It mostly delivers on its promise of letting you solve puzzles through almost any means you can imagine, and for the most part things work like they should. I imagine years from now we’re going to have a console game like this with life-like graphics and even more depth to item interactions, but for now Scribblenauts is an amazingly creative game and very well done. If you have a DS, you should get this; so long as you go in with a creative and open mind, you’ll love it.

Post-Review Note: Some of my regular readers are creepy... almost all of you that I spoke with asked me to summon Cthulhu as the very first thing you wanted me to try in Scribblenauts. You’ll be pleased to know this did indeed summon a huge green elder demon like you were hoping, but I can’t help but think many of you have been reading "Who Will Be Eaten First?" (Disclaimer: link contains minor profanity) a little too often.