'Scribblenauts' revolutionizes puzzle play on the Nintendo DS

— -- Puzzle-loving gamers may feel a seismic jolt when loading Scribblenauts, a new puzzle game from Warner Bros. Interactive, because the game revolutionizes the way to play puzzles. This game distinguishes itself from the hundreds of other games releasing on the Nintendo DS this fall because it has a unique shtick: scribble the name of an object that you want to use to solve a puzzle, and it appears on the screen. With this think-it, write-it, play-with-it mechanic, puzzle solutions can be all over the map, limited only by your imagination.

Scribblenauts offers 220 puzzles spread over 10 themed worlds into which you can summon over 10,000 playable items. The glossary of words includes everyday items such as ladders, ropes and lassos, but also contains fanciful objects like unicorns, magic carpets and black holes. Summoning Death and God can be quite intriguing.

Each of the puzzles features Maxwell, a cute little guy that you control. The goal of each puzzle is to pick up a star which appears somewhere in the puzzle environment. There are two types of challenges: puzzle levels and action levels. The puzzle levels give you instructions about what your objective is and when you accomplish that objective, the star appears. The action puzzles are simply about manipulating an environment so that you can get to the unreachable star.

A puzzle level may be as simple as having Maxwell capture a butterfly fluttering above him. One solution is to scribble the word "flower" in the on-screen notebook called the WritePad, which then causes a flower to appear. By touching the flower with your stylus, you can place it right next to Maxwell. Seeing the flower, the butterfly will now fly down to it, which enables Maxwell to capture it.

An example of an action puzzle is figuring out a way to get a star out of a tree. You can conjure up a ladder to help Maxwell climb up to the star, or you might decide to use a lasso. Cutting down the tree with a summoned axe is also an option.