Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Look, up in the sky! It's a bird. It's a plane. It's a Heririn! The actual aeronautical legitimacy of the craft in Kururin Squash is still up for debate but it spins, though. That’s what it does. Although the manual does insist on calling this paradox of engineering a Heririn.

Guiding the perpetually-spinning whatnot through the maze is the aim of the game, avoid the moving things, the walls and pick up a few coins and, for those with their underpants on the outside, getting to the finish as quickly as possible collecting everything feasible. Elegant simplicity. Bolt onto that a few special powers and novelty stages with character design to adorn the walls of a padded cell, and it's a veritable beverage of freaky weirdness.

Kururin Squash relies wholly on the principle of player desire. Emotional attachment and resolving the plot are impossible because of the high levels of Japanese on display, and somehow understanding the stick puppet sequences would do an injustice to their anarchic, inventive appeal. Besides it’s a puzzle game, not a Bunraku opera. With this in mind, getting that quirky rotating blade home just seems that darn bit more important than working out plot holes and character motivations.

Early stages are a simple matter of acclimatisation, in a world of fruit-based housing. Move the whirling wonder to the goal, gauge its subtle analogue control, accelerate and increase the rate of spin to get to the summit of the stage's Top 3 Leaderboard, where the only opponent is the last best time. Later on in this world, though, heinous monolithic pink dodecahedrons block the way (with mischievous green and red fish blighting this beautiful universe in an evil dance of dastardly dominance), so a special craft is launched to combat the mighty coin-retaining foe: a spinning mechanical marvel with boxing gloves at each end of the propeller; destroy the enemies and spin on to victory.

After seven stages, a world is completed by disabling the (always inept) purpled-headed duck - a monstrous villain whose objective is the disruption of the life around Kururin. The difficulty of the stages within a world does increase as the games goes on and, combined with the introduction of a few more stage-specific Heririn craft, the variety of the mazes and the terrors contained avoid becoming entirely mundane. These additional Heririn introduce a welcome variety, introducing more action-orientated levels with some of the new craft, and more puzzle, technique-laden routes with others. Navigational quandaries start coming thick and fast - with the timer ticking away and the enemies becoming more lucid, the balance between coin collection and successful stage completion becomes more cerebral.

Even though the vibrant, primary colour palette graphics are in three dimensions the fundamental gameplay is only on the one plane, there aren't any levels that introduce a true, brain-burning interdimensional depth. This is a good thing, as minding the forever-rotating Heririn is a full-time role. The mazes are constructed in a way so that the flow, rhythm and pace are dictated by the squeeze and plateau of the life-removing walls. Magnificent maze design can only be mastered when a sequence of lefts and rights are accomplished in one fluid movement; the velocity of this movement can be controlled with the two-tone speed and rotation of the Heririn. Hesitation can be the biggest stumbling block but the faster through the maze, the more dexterous and spatially aware the player has to be, with all the skills amalgamating into a rewarding experience. Collecting all the coins on the level isn't required but the more coins collected, the more paraphernalia can be bought from the shop.

Purchasable bonus items available include: the ability to restart from a checkpoint halfway through a treacherous level; the added bonus of a few more hearts for a stage; for those with an eye on the latest fashions the garage can be filled with multitudes of different Heririn, anything from a different colour to the wildest two-pronged configurations ever conceived. Alternative HUDs can be purchased as well as demo reels of how to (or, in some cases, how NOT to) complete a stage.

If the lunacy of the Story Mode is too much to take emotionally, there are a few more options open to the committed player: Time Trial offers a frill-free avalanche of levels to pit the skills acquired from the Story Mode against, with just the maze and the clock to beat. A splitscreen multiplayer event is ever present, offering two modes of play - Race and Battle. Race is the time-trial levels again but with an opponent or three knocking each other into obstacles. Battle sees everyone on the same table trying to collect as many coins as possible, whilst attacking each other with the power-ups strewn about - not quite the comprehensive multitude of extras available in other puzzle games. Unfortunately the GBA-to-GC link game, unlockable in the single-player shop, is a hideous example of how to waste time finding a cable. Matching patterned Heririn, the GBA screen gets one Heririn and the GameCube has a selection to choose from… identify the correct one and continue!

Underneath its charm and quirky banter, Kururin Squash has a simple, intriguing concept which, when rolled in with all the artwork and primary school zaniness, makes for an enjoyable experience. However, the single-player modes rarely offer more than a fleeting challenge and the only real obstacles are those in the player's mind. A certain Zen-like discipline needs to be attained to get to the goal, with the special-stage Heririn mixing up the difficulty with their new play techniques. If anything, the youthful exuberance of the game probably matches the intended target audience: essentially Kururin Squash must have been made for children, as there doesn't appear to be any subtle Nintendo masterpiece here, just a charming, easily accessible, vibrant and well put-together puzzle/action game.