Yeah sorry for the Mike Myers!Cat in the Hat jumpscare but I wanted to get this one out of the way first due to personal preferences.
Most of you reading this should probably have some passing knowledge of that live-action Cat in the Hat movie from 2003, that or you saw a meme or clip of that film's Cat doing something inappropriate. If not, there's probably like tens of dozens of video reviews talking about it and/or all the crap that happened during production that made it come out the way it did, and they'll probably explain it better than I can.
Anyway... at the time it came out, cheap licensed games based on whatever IP you could use in a sentence were still all the rage and actually affordable to make, and as it turns out this good-for-nothing bum had one, too. I ended up coming across some playthroughs of it in elementary while looking up the film on YouTube (I tended to do that a lot for shows or films that got my attention), and at the time I had a bit of a thing for iffy licensed games so it ended up sticking in the back of my head for nearly a decade or so; come high school I'd run into another playthrough of it from a YT channel who specializes in that kind of grimy licensed game genre, which then led to this whole thing where I was partially obsessing over the furniture in the hub world for some reason and even making fucking gijinkas of all of them which I still sometimes draw for certain occasions, and after that I was eventually convinced to try the game myself. Luckily depsite living in a time where hobbies aren't cheap anymore, the game also happens to be obscure as all hell, presumably thanks to its association with a film that isn't popular to begin with, which roughly translated to it not even costing 2 figures online even in CAD.
Now, the game itself. Anyone here played Klonoa? 'Cuz it's basically one of his games, if he was middle-aged and he trapped his enemies in bubbles instead of inflating them; it's even got the same 2.5D shtick the mainline console games have, enemies jump to and from the foreground and background, the works. Every level takes place in one of the aforementioned furniture in the Waldens' house, each with a bunch of collectibles and "magic pieces" which you need to grab all of to turn that particular furniture back to normal for 100% completion (the whole thing takes place in the last act of the film where the Cat's crate effectively turned the place into a Dark World from Deltarune). Each also has a bonus room locked behind keys you take by force from Thing 1 and 2, which have one other collectible which unlocks a bonus level that also counts toward 100% completion for some reason. Also, they turned the bad guy neighbour played by Alec Baldwin into a discount Dr. Eggman, complete with some clam-looking flying mech which you fight every 3-4 levels.
Of course, this is still a video game made in a hurry to promote something. There's only ten levels not counting the boss fights and the bonus level, they made them fairly long to compensate but they also get a bit repetitive, especially near the last third; sometimes you'll want to shoot something but have to wait around for an enemy to respawn, certain obstacles require "goo-balls" to break which require you to run over to some machine which may or may not be half a minute from there and back and occasionally they'll try throwing in a bunch of boxes with collectibles that needs you to make multiple trips to open them all. Also, the aforementioned neighbour is the only boss in the game, with only extra attacks for each fight to spice them up. Oh, and the character models all look terrible, though you probably already figured that out just by looking at the thumbnail.
In short, it's pretty much what you'd expect of a 2000s licensed game coinciding with an unpopular movie. For all intents and purposes I probably wouldn't even be talking about it to the extent I am if I didn't find out about it at the time I did, and I only know like one other person online who'd be willing to vouch for it in my place. But I am and I did, and, well, here I am.
Oh, and the fish is voiced by Nolan North AKA the Nathan Drake guy. Felt like mentioning that too.
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