SpongeBob SquarePants: The Cosmic Shake has only been with us for about a week, and players are already finding ways to exploit its mechanics to hell and back. Better yet, their efforts are bearing fruit, as they've found a way to skip huge platforming segments, bypassing most of the first world altogether.
By looking up and using the ground pound ability, players are able to keep SpongeBob floating in the air indefinitely, getting past areas we're definitely not supposed to. The bug is obviously very useful in speedrunning, but is also helping fans sequence break into areas that would usually require certain abilities to access, giving you more freedom in how you tackle the world.
The glitch can be seen in action here, used in the streamer Shift's current world record speedrun of The Cosmic Shake. Incidentally, he shared a new record seven minutes before I started writing this article, getting the time down to 49:59, the first sub-50-minute record.
As you can see at the 3:30 mark, Shift is able to manipulate the game into letting him go across an area that you definitely aren't supposed to jump over. In doing this, he skips a bunch of other, slower platforming segments, before doing so again pretty much as soon as he hits land.
Since I am not a speedrunner and made my way through the game as the devs intended, I had to bring in an expert to explain what is happening here (shout out to my younger brother, Zac). Basically, for some reason, if SpongeBob is not in frame, the game allows you to jump and then immediately ground pound. This causes the player to stay in the air without falling back down to the ground, but only for as long as SpongeBob remains out of frame. If the camera defaults back, you'll start falling again, killing you if you're not over a ramp or some ground.
It remains to be seen if the devs decide to patch this out of the game, but fingers crossed, it stays in for future speedruns to come. The bug is easy enough to ignore if you don't go out of your way to pull it off, so it's pretty harmless.
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