Comedy has always been a tricky prospect in video games. There are plenty of games that have been funny in one way or another, sure. Dialogue-rich titles like the Monkey Island series offer plenty of room for jokes, and there’s slapstick fun to be found in things like Untitled Goose Game and Octodad, but the idea of something interactive having the comedic timing of a TV sketch show or sitcom? I would’ve thought that out of reach before playing Thank Goodness You’re Here – a “slapformer” and follow-up effort to 2019’s gross-em-up, The Good Time Garden, from Yorkshire’s Coal Supper. This might be the funniest game I’ve played since Katamari Damacy.
TGYH opens with a simple enough goal. You, a small and balding white collar chump, have been tasked by your boss to visit the town of Barnsworth (loosely based on the South Yorkshire town of Barnsley where the studio originates from) to sell their mayor… something. The details hardly matter though, because on arrival you’re told there’ll be bit of a wait for your appointment, and rather than sit in an office waiting room for hours you’re free to explore this quaint borough and take in the sights – and the locals.
As it turns out, the folks of Barnsworth are an interesting lot, packed with an unmistakably Yorkshire charm and, more importantly, in dire need of help. Luckily for them, this is a video game, and so we as the player are naturally compelled to assist – and thus forms the adventure. Occupying your time as you wait for your meeting with its mayor, your tour through the town sees you take on a number of core objectives, each beginning with the meeting of another of Barnsworth’s barmy denizens, who’ll exclaim the game’s title and divulge to you the nature of the circumstance they’re in – a circumstance only a tiny visitor on entirely unrelated business can solve.
You might need to help Ron of Ron’s Big Pies with a meat supply issue, for example, or attempt to calm a fruit and veg shop owner who’s snapped after a few too many comments on his enormous noggin. The solutions to Barnsworth’s problems are never as simple as they seem, and you’ll find going to some strange lengths (and strange locations) in the name of doing favours for a bunch of complete strangers.
Of course, between these core tasks are a multitude of other encounters with, and favours for, other Barnsworthians. You’re wholeheartedly encouraged to slap everything and everyone in sight – in fact it’s your primary means of interaction in a game with but two functional commands, slap and jump. Your little guy doesn’t speak, but a quick biff’ll usually have the other party chatting or, in the case of more inanimate objects, help you figure out how to get wherever it is you need to go. It’s ostensibly a point-and-click-style adventure game peppered with vignettes of side-scrolling platform gameplay, trimmed of inventory faff and with far more hitting.
One thing that this game does wonderfully is keep you on-task and headed in the right direction without any guidance whatsoever. Where the complete lack of any noted objectives or waypointing might spell doom for a similar game, Barnsworth’s stories continue with each repeated lap of its streets, ‘steads and surrounds so that you’re always enticed by a new door opened, a new citizen in strife or a new and mysterious hole to penetrate. Some of the game’s best gags come from these round trips as jokes recur or develop over time, even just from wandering the one area in circles while you look for a crucial interaction, so there’s almost never any downtime. And if all else fails, slapping something that’s gone heretofore un-slapped is usually a good way to go.
There’s a modest bit of replay value if you’re the sort to want to see every possible bit of dialogue or throwaway joke, though after my third(ish) playthrough to nab the game’s platinum trophy I was well and truly tired of traversing the same handful of streets. I can see some players becoming frustrated with the lack of direction as well, and coupled with the fact that there’s no way to revisit earlier sequences or even choose anything other than “New Game” once you’ve rolled credits, it’s certainly a barebones presentation. With a runtime of less than three hours and with how rapidly the game fires out new jokes or absurd scenes though, you really won’t have time to feel down on it.
Crucially, TGYH is consistently hilarious. Anyone who’s grown up on absurdist British comedies like Monty Python will be right at home in Barnsworth from the bustling local chippy to the dankest, bean-strewn alleyways. It’s all incredibly sharp, shamefully gross, frequently illogical and instantly quotable. Thanks to the semi-linear nature of the adventure, Coal Supper has managed to pull off some incredible feats of comedic timing, either in gameplay or the multitude of cutaway scenes, all of which are wonderfully animated and acted.
The game’s art is a triumph all round, making Barnsworth a truly unique and memorable place rendered with crude but gorgeous hand-drawn characters and environments, and backed up by an appropriately-tooty soundtrack and a voice cast that includes the inevitable Matt Berry as a hose-sucking, fertiliser-fucking, tomato-munching gardener besides. The aforementioned lack of any in-game menus or guidance means there’s never any on-screen clutter or anything to take you out of the moment, either – though it does give players the option at the beginning to receive their subtitles and UI in Yorkshire dialect among the other available languages, which is brilliant.
It’s all capped off by a perfect finale, both thematically and artistically, that I won’t get out of my head any time soon, and a secret, alternate ending that’s less rewarding but just as *chef’s kiss* – both of which exemplify the underlying wit of even the most ridiculous and absurd media British sketch comedies.
