Nickelodeon SpongeBob SquarePants - Creature from the Krusty Krab

The structure is the joke. Every stage is somebody's dream, which gives Blitz Games license to break its own rules constantly: SpongeBob rolls through a gauntlet as a sealed ball of sponge in one chapter, Patrick swells into a lumbering superhero in the next, and Plankton gets to run around Bikini Bottom in a giant mechanical body doing exactly the amount of damage a tiny megalomaniac would want. There is no obligation to keep a consistent world when the world is subconscious.

That freedom is the best thing about the game and also the reason it never settles. The Sponge-Ball sections lean on momentum and tilt-based nudging, closer to a marble course than a platformer. Patrick's levels are about smashing and throwing, deliberately heavy and slow. There are vehicle stretches, including a truck-style run that feels transplanted from a different licence entirely. Individually most of these ideas are competent. Stacked back to back, they mean you spend the first minute of each chapter relearning what the controller does.

The presentation is where the licence earns its keep. The character models have the right rubbery proportions, the dream logic lets the art team throw out Bikini Bottom's colour palette whenever it likes, and the original voice cast keeps the writing from sounding like a knock-off. The 2006 series was already deep into its post-movie era, and this is one of the tie-ins that reads as though someone watched the show rather than the style guide.

As a 2006 PS2 release it sits in the tail end of the licensed-platformer economy, when publishers were still funding mid-budget kids' games with real production values because the audience reliably showed up. It is not as tightly built as Battle for Bikini Bottom, which remains the series' high-water mark for level design, and the difficulty spikes in the later robot sections are the kind of thing a short attention span will not forgive. Camera trouble in tight corridors is a genuine irritation.

Still, there is something disarming about a children's game whose organising principle is that nothing has to make sense. Variety was the pitch, and for once the pitch was honest — this thing is a grab bag, and it knows it. Play it as a series of sketches rather than a campaign and it holds together better than it has any right to.