Thank Goodness You're Here!
Released: August 1, 2024
Developer: Coal Supper
Publisher: Panic Inc.
Systems: PC (reviewed), PS5, Switch
Thank Goodness You’re Here! is absolutely bloody stupid… and I love it.
Barnsworth, a town in the North of England, is a ridiculous place. A man peeps through a hole in a fence, pushing sausages through to passers by. A young man is too “milk shy” to get what he needs from a nearby cow. A bootlegger sells watches so fake they’re just painted onto his table.
The local supermarket is called Price Shaggers, because of course it is.
As a little yellow man whose physical dimensions casually change depending on whatever size the plot needs him to be, you help the weirdos of Barnsworth meet their increasingly eccentric needs armed only with the ability to jump and slap stuff.
Slapping is almost exclusively how you interact in this world, save for the occasional pushing and pulling. You smack people to address them, you hit things to get them working, and every now and then you’ll need to jump on boxes, out of windows, and into chimneys. Interactivity is super rudimentary, yet you wind up involved in all manner of wild chicanery that starts with one little wallop.
Wielding an open palm, you’ll help a handyman find the tools he’s accused others of stealing, you’ll whack a tap to send water from a hose into the pants of a gardener, and you’ll send a huge stick of butter sliding across the street to help a foppish lad free his arm from a sewer grate. He was reaching through it to grab a tuppence, obviously.
Words cannot quite do justice to the relentless nonsense Thank Goodness You’re Here! merrily commits. It’s an onslaught of sight gags, slapstick, innuendo, and surreal sequences that defy rationality.
Thank Goodness is, quite simply, very fucking funny.
It’s hard not to talk about the sheer Britishness on display. This is immediately apparent from the opening cutscene’s stock footage of red buses and terraced houses on cobbled streets. Heavy use of slang and uniquely British stereotypes may, at times, render the game baffling to those outside the UK - more baffling than it already is, at any rate.
Even the main menu could be unintelligible to the uninitiated. Options like “Gu’on” and “Si’thee” might make ye wanna bray summat if tha’nose nowt o’ t’lingo.
Barnsworth could be seen as an extremely exaggerated portrayal of the North if it wasn’t all true. As someone who lives in Yorkshire, I can confirm that everything here does indeed cost ten bob, the people subsist almost exclusively on pies, and youngsters fish in trash-filled rivers.
I have entertained myself immensely by telling my Northerner husband these things. That they haven’t left me is a miracle.
Essentially a narrative adventure game with trace amounts of puzzle-platforming, gameplay is generally minimal with progression hinging on just going where directed and slapping what’s there. The point of the game is not to be challenged but to simply enjoy as your silent avatar finds himself scuttling from one ludicrous scenario to the next.
Early on, you push a lawnmower in the background while a pair of happy flowers are sighing “I love you” to each other, getting closer to the foreground as you mow back and forth. It is obvious where the scene is going, yet still I had to laugh when I finally cut one down. The surviving flower then immediately found another one to continue its romantic feedback loop and I laughed again.
I audibly laughed quite a few times throughout. Not every gag lands, but so many are fired off that it hardly matters. The silly dialogue, the borderline abstract desires of the residents, the cutscenes so bizarre I giggled out of disbelief. Amusing as heck.
Amidst all the cartoonishness, occasional dreamlike sequences stand out as particularly bizarre. Some carry dark connotations and are even unsettling at times, yet they maintain the nonsensical tone and fit right in before you’re back to more innocent silliness - silliness such as sending seagulls back to their commander.
The seagull’s commander is a man living in a Tardis-like dumpster. His name is Brigadier Bean Tin.
Anything I could describe makes just as much sense in context because the context is thoroughly insensible.
The vocal cast does a fantastic job, delivering all this absurdity with a parade of over-the-top voices in deliciously thick accents. The performances put me in mind of the work of David Firth, which is no bad thing in my book.
Really, a whole host of British comedy influences can be found, as one might expect. The League of Gentlemen’s own flavor of Northern weirdness and the surreal sketches of Reeves & Mortimer must surely have provided some inspiration.
I adore Thank Goodness’ art style. With its bright flat coloring and bold black outlines, it looks every bit like the kind of post-watershed cartoons I shouldn’t have been watching growing up. Well, it looks better than those - let’s face it, visual direction wasn’t their strongest suit back then. Suffice to say, it looks great, features memorable character designs, and the animation is lovely.
The ceaselessness of the oddity may prove a little tiring at times, notably once you’ve visited all the exterior locations and start circling back around for new events. It’s funny to see your little guy squeezing his deadpan way through a drainpipe once, not so much after a few cycles of the same thing.
While every character interaction you have is interesting, the very small selection of incidental discoveries is disappointing. You can find a few fun surprises, like smacking bin bags in quick succession to reveal singing rats, but hitting most of the other objects or NPCs yields little more than superficial damage or cries of “oof.”
Perhaps this is greedy, however, considering how consistently remarkable this whole production is. For its relatively short runtime, it does manage to pack in quite the shedload of shenanigans.
Thank Goodness You're Here! rolls around in its Britishness to an almost obscene degree, but more than that it is simply… stupid. Majestically, gloriously stupid. It’s a wildly entertaining little adventure that revels in its own ludicrous indulgences. It delightedly broadcasts a sense of humor that some may find puerile and unappealing while others will find it puerile and very appealing.
Thank goodness I’m in the latter camp.
9/10
