If you ever have a kid, I can’t recommend this game more. It’s good for when kids are four to five years old, but it can be fun all the way to adulthood. The game I’m talking about is Scribblenauts Unlimited. I started playing this game with my dad when I was about five years old, and now I’m able to play it with my little brother.
For those who don’t know, the Scribblenauts series is about solving puzzles with a magic notebook that creates anything you write in it. Unlimited has a little bit of story, but it’s pretty negligible. In Scribblenauts Unlimited, your character, Maxwell, and his sister, Lily, are setting out from home, he with a magic notebook that does the same thing as discussed above, and she with a magic globe that can take you wherever you want to go in the world. On the road, they encounter an old man begging for food. Maxwell, deciding to be rude, makes him a rotten apple. The old man turns out to be a wizard who curses Lily to get back at him. She starts turning to stone, and the only way to help her is to get “starites,” which are stars that you get for helping other people.
The game can be as fun as you want it to be. On one hand, you could just treat it as a simple puzzle game, and do the first thing that comes to your mind. On the other hand, you could use the most ridiculous solution imaginable. For example, one of the first people you meet needs you to get her cat out of a tree. You could just make a ladder to grab the cat and bring it down, or food to bait it, or make Cthulhu and fly up to get the cat.
The game is limited because it’s a bit old, so you can’t make more modern stuff, and you can’t use copyrighted stuff, for obvious reasons. But there are still hours of fun to be had. As I mentioned before, I’ve been playing through with my brother because he’s just getting to the age where he kind of knows how to spell, so I’ll have him spell the words. There are some words where he needs help, but that’s not the game’s fault; it’s the English language’s.
Overall, I’ve enjoyed this game for nine or ten years. I’ve played it countless times, because each playthrough is different, and now I’m happy that I can share that love with the next generation.