5TH Cell Reveals Scribblenauts For The DS

In an interview with IGN, 5TH Cell, the creators of well-regarded DS games Drawn to Life and Locke's Quest have unveiled their newest touchscreen opus, Scribblenauts, a sort of vocabulary-based platforming puzzle game. Like the first two titles, this new game takes a novel approach when using the touch screen, and perhaps one of the most ambitious in the DS's history. The company's co-founder and creative director Jeremiah Slaczka explains:

What Scribblenauts is about in a nutshell is basically "Anything you write, you can use." That's where the concept really came from. It's the idea of "What if you had all these puzzles, and in order to solve them you can write anything; the limit is your imagination." How you do that is through this character Maxwell. As Maxwell you have to grab in-level objects called Starites, and to do that you can write anything you want, and it'll spawn that object. So if there's a Starite in the tree, you could write "ladder" and then a ladder would spawn. Climb up the ladder, and you grab the Starite.

There're more ways of doing it though obviously. You could write "axe", and then cut the tree down using the object you spawned. You could write "shuriken" and throw that at the Starite in the tree and knock it down. It's all based on real physics and interaction, so there's nothing pre-canned. You could write anything though; imagine you write "goldfish" for some reason, well a goldfish would spawn and sit on the ground. It wouldn't help you at all in that puzzle, but you could do it.

The trailer promises hundreds of levels, with multiple ways to play through each. There may also be some online component to the game, but Slaczka wouldn't go into specifics. The developers seem pretty confident that they'll be able to anticipate most of what people are going to come up with. Obviously "vulgar" words are being left out, but they're trying to make sure every noun you can think of will be in there, claiming that "people won't write half the things that exist in this game because they're so obscure. You just don't think of them." That sounds like a challenge! I already picture myself playing this game with a dictionary and a thesaurus by my side.

If you're a little confused by the description, watch the trailer as it really makes the game seem like it has a lot of potential. No doubt a title like this will be filled with little tricks and easter eggs just waiting for people to discover them, but I'm a little worried that title might turn a lot of people off. After all, the last hyped game ending with "-nauts" didn't exactly set cash registers on fire. The game doesn't have a publisher at the moment, but they're looking to have it out by Fall 2009.

World Debut: Scribblenauts [IGN]