The Holy Gosh Darn

Genre: Graphic Adventure

Players: 1

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Review:

The Holy Gosh Darn is a humorous Graphic Adventure released in 2024 on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. In this game, players take the role of Cassiel of Celerity, an angel in heaven who suddenly finds herself the only one able to stop an incoming horde of phantoms from entering the pearly gates and putting an end to the universe. To do so, she is given a magical time-travel stopwatch that she must use to move back and forth through time in the six hours between the time she awakens and the time the entire universe explodes.

The way The Holy Gosh Darn handles time travel and puzzles is really clever. No matter what you’re doing, time is constantly ticking down, which means that long conversations with characters are sapping away an invaluable resource, but choosing not to hear someone out could come back to bit you as they refuse to interact with you later if you were rude to them before.

Add to this Majora’s Mask-style time travel rules: when you go back in time, the conversations you had, the changes you made, and the objects you collected are all undone (later you get some wiggle room on this, though). This means that players will need to think through order of operations when specific things need to happen at certain times, or in a particular order. Thankfully, Cassiel does at least retain her knowledge of conversations the player has already seen that were subsequently undone by time travel, allowing her to shortcut her way through some events and conversations.

The game is also pretty flexible with how it will enable you to travel through time. You can always automatically pass time until a certain event unfolds, and you can always rewind or wait in 15-minute increments. You’ll also be able to “bookmark” a specific time to rewind back to, if you want to get to something more specific. As a result of this, The Holy Gosh Darn can create some really clever time-bending puzzles while giving players flexible tools that don’t make them feel frustrated if they take too long with something or mess up the order they do things in – the rewind feature is always waiting to take them back to roughly the time they messed things up so they can retry.

The presentation here is great, with whimsical cartoony 2D visuals with a lot of fun little gags going on in the background, such as signs saying “Do Not Feed the Cherubs”, or a pair of guys you repeatedly pass as you go about your tasks, always seeming to be in different parts of their conversation about inane nonsense. On that note, the voice acting here is all excellent, with fun characters and Cassiel in particular really delightful as she becomes increasingly exasperated with the bureaucratic stupidity she needs to contend with as she tries to save the universe. This is all backed by a whimsical soundtrack that fits this game’s tone perfectly.

When it comes to complaints, I honestly don’t have much. I suppose I think the humor could have been sharper, and it would have been nice to have more of an introduction to this game’s version of heaven before things go awry. Likewise, it would have been nice to have more of an introduction to Cassiel and Azrael too. Still, all of these are pretty minor complaints.

Overall, The Holy Gosh Darn is a wonderful whimsical romp in a silly version of the afterlife with good humor, great characters, solid voice acting, and some really excellent time-travelling Graphic Adventure puzzles. I think fans of this genre should absolutely pick this one up.

tl;dr – The Holy Gosh Darn is a humorous Graphic Adventure about an angel trying to save all of existence when a horde of phantoms suddenly invades heaven, using a magical time-traveling stopwatch to go back and forth through the day to keep the apocalypse from unfolding. This game has a great mix of wonderful characters, solid humor, and excellent time-traveling puzzles that make it a superb choice for any fan of the genre.

Grade: B+

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

Runner-Up: Best Graphic Adventure / Visual Novel, Funniest Game, Best Voice Acting

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