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I’ll never understand why 5th Cell didn’t do this in the first place. The bigger innovation in Super Scribblenauts is the addition of 9,000-plus adjectives to the dictionary, and the geometric explosion of complexity they create. It’s one thing to ask the universe for a pathologist. It’s quite another when you get to specify a fire-breathing leftist pathologist. It is pure fun just fooling around with the functionally infinite possibilities, watching the chaos that ensues when, say, carnivorous tree meets foolish delicious baby. There’s an actual game here, and its style is markedly different from its predecessor. There are far fewer action-oriented challenges - although the solid new controls could have handled them better - and a greater focus on straight-up puzzles. With the levels made less open-ended, even as the player’s available options were expanded by orders of magnitude, you end up in situations where a solution that seems like it ought to work just doesn’t.

You are forced into trial-and-error recombination of nouns and adjectives until the game’s unintuitive Moon logic is satisfied. It’s not a total fun-killer - really, it’s no different than any other limitation of in-game freedom -but contrasted with the infinite bounty of the dictionary system, any feeling of restriction chafes. That chafing aside, Super Scribblenauts is a good game and a wonderful toy, a showcase for the interesting, usually hilarious possibilities of “emergent gameplay,” play that arises from the real-time interaction of objects and properties rather than from scripted events.