Thank Goodness You’re Here!

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

(Note: Included in Untitled Goose Game & Thank Goodness You’re Here! Bundle, along with Untitled Goose Game.)

Thank Goodness You’re Here!, released in 2024 on PC, PlayStation 4, and Nintendo Switch, is a game that its creators refer to as a “Comedy Slapformer”, but I would argue probably best fits into the Graphic Adventure genre, even though you don’t talk with people, for the most part don’t have an inventory for items, and your only forms of interacting with the environment are jumping and slapping. Okay, let me explain…

Players take the role of a diminutive salesman sent to the fictional British town of Barnsworth to meet with the town’s mayor and secure a sale. Arriving early, you head into the town and encounter numerous odd characters, many of whom ask for your help (usually starting off their plea by saying the game’s title). This help tends to come in the form of going around and slapping someone else related to their problem, prompting them to talk at you, or sometimes you’ll slap something to assist with a problem.

Yeah, as noted before, apart from walking around, your only actions in this game are slapping and jumping, and slapping also doubles as a “talk” button, with the townsfolk apparently not minding at all when you give them a whack to get them yapping (though they’ll often give a startled yelp). Your character is seemingly mute, so they’ll do all the talking, occasionally needing to be slapped again to prod them into continuing.

Slapping also acts as your “interact” button most of the time, whether it’s starting up a garden hose nozzle or getting fish out of their wrapper and subsequently getting cigarettes out of the fish (they’re smoked fish, you see). Where in many Graphic Adventure games you’ll spend a lot of time clicking on everything, here you’ll find yourself slapping everything. Even when it doesn’t help you to solve someone’s problems, it’ll still often make something interesting or funny happen.

Of course, all of this is feeding into this game’s main goal of being absolutely hilarious, a goal it succeeds at quite frequently. The entire game is permeated with the sort of British silliness you’d associate with the likes of Monty Python and The IT Crowd, but with the sort of pacing and animated humor you’d expect from Rick & Morty and Futurama.

(From here on, I’m going to have to start redacting gags to avoid spoilers, but I’ll leave them in if you’re curious)

At one point, you assist shopkeeper Big Ron in making his “big pies” by heading to the local butcher for some meat, only for you to get trapped in Ron’s oven and bashing your way out in a way that results in one massive pie filling up his shop… which then cuts to a commercial of him advertising his biggest pie yet, only to find it being watched with barely-restrained rage by a competing shopkeeper known for his extra small pies. At another point, you make your way into the local vegetable store, only to find the shopkeeper there having a flashback to all the times people mocked his massive head.

The entire game is filled with gags big and small, including silly signs (“Lost cat. Also lost: 1 Child”), silly one-liners (“It’s always the criminals doing crime…”), silly cutaways (early on, a pair of flowers sweetly say “I love you” back and forth as you creep closer and closer to them with a lawnmower), running gags like a trio of singing rodents, plenty of physical comedy (your character takes an inhuman amount of physical punishment, but always gets back up), blatant innuendo (one random guy offers you a sausage through the hole in his fence in a very suggestive manner… until it falls through and he goes to grab another) and a wealth of absolute absurdity.

Throughout it all, one of the clever things this game does is maintain a sense of continuity. Characters here usually aren’t one-and-done, but persist throughout the story, interacting with the other oddball characters you encounter. Damage you do to a shop early on persists when you come back. One couple of neighbors arguing about their trash cans as you pass by them has that argument escalate further and further as you criss-cross the same spot again shortly afterward. And the hapless clerk who loses a shop’s keys early on in the game is later seen exchanging geeky flirtations with another shopkeeper’s assistant. The persistent and connected nature of this game’s world really helps to make it all feel like a real living, breathing place, even if the entire thing is cartoonish and nonsensical.

The presentation is a large part of what makes this work too. While most of the game is portrayed using cartoony hand-drawn characters and environments with an adorably ridiculous look to them, at times the game uses other media like grainy live-action footage that evokes older British television shows. And all of this is joined by various whimsical music (most notably the old-timey into song, The Marrow Song), with all of the game’s characters fully-voiced, but not always sticking to the subtitles, giving the game a rough and at times amateurish quality that only adds to its charm.

When it comes to complaints, my main one is that it’s not always clear where you’re supposed to go, or how you’re supposed to get there. The game’s areas are connected by various passages and paths that are not always direct, and they shift and change as the game goes on, people move around, and more damage is done to the town. Often you’ll have so many people you’re helping at once that you can’t help but stumble on solutions for some of them, but once you’ve narrowed it down to a few it can be harder to figure out where you need to go next. For that matter, sometimes the place you need to go for a quest is unintuitive, and you’ll often find yourself stumbling on these while wandering or trying to resolve another quest. However, if you don’t stumble upon a solution you’re looking for, you may end up wandering around a lot feeling lost.

Still, it’s hard for me to be too critical of this game. While it can be confusing and nonsensical, and it’s easy to get lost or be unsure what to do next, Thank Goodness You’re Here! still remains consistently charming, funny, wildly creative, and unpredictable, and if you’re a fan of British comedy or animated comedy or just plain absurd silly comedy, this is absolutely a game you’ll want to play.

tl;dr – Thank Goodness You’re Here! is a Graphic Adventure where players take the role of a quiet, diminutive salesman wandering around an absurd British town, helping the locals with their silly problems. This game is absolutely full of great humor, it’s wildly creative, and it manages to keep surprising you as you play it. It’s a bit too easy to get lost or not know where you need to go next, but this game’s wonderful humor and adorable charm far outweigh any issues it has. If you’re looking for a great comedy game, this is a must-play.

Grade: A-

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2024 Game Awards:

Winner:

Funniest Game – This had to be the easiest call I had to make in the entire awards ceremony this year. It’s not that the runners-up this year aren’t funny, because they definitely are. It’s that Thank Goodness You’re Here! is the funniest videogame I have played in years. This game’s delightful absurdist British humor, it’s wonderfully ridiculous characters, and silly core gameplay where your sole way of interacting with the world is by slapping it all makes for a game that will keep players laughing throughout.

Runner-Up: Best Graphic Adventure / Visual Novel, Most Original, Best Voice Acting, Best Graphical Style, Best New Character – The Salesman

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