Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment announced Scribblenauts Unmasked: A DC Comics Adventure today, a Scribblenauts game for Wii U, 3DS and Windows PC with a DC Comics twist.
Developed by 5th Cell, the game is structured around the story of Maxwell and his sister Lily, who travel into the DC universe with Maxwell's magic notebook and summon DC-specific characters and objects to solve puzzles.
Speaking to Polygon, Scribblenauts Unmasked's senior producer, Caleb Arseneaux said the game contains every character who has ever appeared in a DC comic book, from the Justice League, to all the variations of Batman and Superman, to the most obscure characters who have only had brief cameos in the comics. He said that Scribblenauts is all about letting players have "whatever they want," and the DC universe is so rich with characters who have so many superpowers and abilities, that blending the two franchises made sense to the development team.
"Initially we had 1,200 characters, and then we just kept finding more and more characters and more variations, and eventually we wound up with more than 2,000," Arseneaux said.
The game has 33 different Batmans and 130 Green Lanterns from the various iterations of the DC universe. Every character has different abilities, and every character and object has a biography that players can access to find out more about their background and superpowers. According to Arseneaux, the game's levels and puzzles are structured in such a way that players are encouraged to replay them using different characters.
In a demo shown to Polygon, Arseneaux highlighted all the DC twists littered throughout the game. All locations are modeled on places in the DC universe, such as the Bat Cave and Green Lantern's headquarters, and even objects that players summon are DC-inspired.
"So when you play Scribblenauts for the first time and you spawn a cat, that's usually when people are like, 'Oh my god, this game has a cat! That's awesome!' Then you type in dog, and the dog appears and starts chasing the cat," he said. "In Unmasked, we have a Red Lantern that is a cat — Dex-Starr — so if you spawn a dog, and then you spawn a cat, Dex-Starr will appear, and when the dog tries to chase him, he'll beat up the dog."
The game also has a hero creator, which allows players to mix and match parts of existing superheroes and villains to create their own DC hybrid character. These characters can be used with Scribblenauts' system of adjectives to change their state even further. In the demo we were shown, Arseneaux summoned a zombie version of a superhero, who proceeded to infect all surrounding superheroes, resulting in a screen full of zombie Batman, Zombie Wonder Woman, Zombie Super Man, and hundreds more.
"I am most excited about how people are going to take our hero creator and what kind of superheroes and villains they are going to make and share online," Arseneaux told Polygon. "It will be awesome to see what people do with their imagination and the tools we give them."
