Confirmed: ‘Scribblenauts Unmasked’ Has Basically Every DC Comics Character [SDCC 2013]

When you essentially just read obscure DC comics for a living, it's pretty easy to see something like Scribblenauts Unmasked as a challenge. I'll admit that when they announced the game by promising that they'd added "over 2,000 DC characters and items" to the game's dictionary of stuff you can drop into it just by writing it out, my first reaction was along the lines of "I bet I could stump it." At Comic-Con, I got my chance when I played through a demo, and I actually couldn't.

This thing has everyone.

If you've never played a Scribblenauts game, the idea is that you run around solving strange and bizarre problems by writing out objects and people that you need to solve your problems. If you need to get over a wall, for instance, you could write "airplane" or "jetpack" and fly over it -- or if you're me, you just write "giant robot Dracula" because there are very few problems that can't solve. For Unmasked, though, the developers have given everything a DC comics makeover, from locations to actual superpowers. This means that means that you can fight Giant Robot Dracula with Giant Robot Batman, which is the only thing anyone should need to know about this game.

I still think I could've stumped it if I'd had enough time, but just going through the alphabetical list of superheroes they had was insanely impressive. I mean, one of the very first characters you see in that thing is Arm-Fall-Off Boy.

He's not alone in the obscurity department, either. This thing has the Sea Devils, the Newsboy Legion (albeit the Golden Age version without Flippa Dippa), that one Green Lantern that double-crossed Jack Knight in Space Prison, and the list goes on from there. And they all have super-powers, too: At one point, I ended up running into a giant crab that was causing trouble and figured that would be the only time Aquaman would come in handy, and this game gave me four different Aquamen to choose from. I picked two and they drove it off.

I'm already a fan of the Scribblenauts games and the way they rely on creativity to solve problems, so throwing in Jimmy Olsen is just icing on the cake. And from the little I played of it, it looks like they've done a pretty stellar job making that icing as appetizing as possible.