Adjectives in particular undermine the game. When solutions aren’t frustrating, they’re often boring.

“How about we all calm down and try a nice bland bucket of water or the very literal fire extinguisher?” Putting out a fire? “Put down that freeze ray you’re thinking too far outside the box,” says the game. You’ll spend a lot of time failing with fun solutions to problems and guessing how a computer would solve them. But due to their seemingly random nature, the solutions are specific and fussy in ways that harken back to the worst of old point and click adventure games. Most of my time in Scribblenauts Unmasked was spent solving its dynamically generated puzzles, where adjectives and nouns are somehow programmatically jammed together to make new problems to take care of on each visit to Metropolis or Gotham City. Even relatively obscure superheroes like Blue Beetle get an outfit, which, once unlocked, I never ever took off. You can unlock many different Scribblenautical DC superhero costumes to put on Maxwell, the game’s rooster-headed hero, and they’re all delightful. My personal preference for superheroes has always been silly and fun over grim and gritty, so seeing characters like Frank Miller’s version of Batman with soft edges and wobbly limbs tickled me to no end. There’s fun to be had in Scribblenauts Unmasked-it’s just awkward getting to it.īy far the coolest thing about Scribblenauts Unmasked is the Bat-Computer, an encyclopedia of the DC Universe where I looked up almost every DC Comics character I could think of (Streaky the Super Cat is sadly missing) and dropped them into the game, adorably rendered in the Scribblenauts “paper doll” art style. In practice, though, the game’s desire to be endless costs those puzzles their focus, and the never-ending battle between good and evil provided by the superheroic setting is better suited for a different kind of game. Combining thousands of classic comic book characters and settings with anything from the player’s imagination means potentially unlimited puzzles for players to tackle. It pairs the Scribblenauts ethos of “create anything you can think of” with the world of DC Comics.

Scribble nauts unlimited story