Scribblenauts came out roughly 17 years ago on the Nintendo DS. I remember first hearing about the concept and being genuinely blown away by how revolutionary it sounded. I was never the most artistic or imaginative kid growing up, but the idea of being able to conjure up literally anything you could think of within a video game felt incredibly cool. I ended up picking it up right around launch, or pretty close to it.

Looking back now, the graphics really haven’t aged well at all. It was never a visual powerhouse on the DS to begin with, but it looks rough today, which is a bit ironic considering it’s a colorful 2D game, and those usually hold up better over time than more graphically ambitious yet gritty titles. It’s also worth mentioning that the top screen never really felt useful, which was honestly a fairly common issue with DS games at the time, with one screen often ending up largely wasted.

What genuinely worked well was using the stylus and touchscreen to type out whatever object you needed. I remember seeing a meme a while back joking that hell is probably being forced to type things out using a video game controller for all eternity. It makes me wonder if later entries in the series, on other consoles, ever found a cleaner solution to that problem.

At its core, the game is really a puzzle title, though at first glance, it almost appears to be a side-scrolling platformer. Everything moves fairly clunkily, but the real hook is scribbling down whatever item you need to solve each level, and for the most part, that mechanic works surprisingly well.

That said, the overall execution has its flaws. I can’t recall the specifics exactly, but I remember the harder levels often demanding solutions that would never naturally occur to you. That cuts both ways. It’s clever, but also occasionally frustrating. Talking through this now honestly makes me want to track down one of the later entries in the series and see if it’s playable on my Nintendo Switch 2. After two decades, I’d imagine the technology, the range of creatable items, and the overall experience have all improved considerably.