Thank Goodness You're Here! review

Thank Goodness You're Here! has an unwavering commitment to eliciting the kind of laughter that makes a little bit of pee come out. From the opening montage of surreal, whimsical and ever-so-slightly unnerving adverts to the anarchic musical number it ends on, it offers no time to breathe between all the guffawing you'll be doing. But it is absolutely worth risking the gag-induced asphyxiation for—it's a small price to pay.

At the end of last year, we called it the Best Comedy Game in our 2024 GOTYs, but for some reason we never actually got around to reviewing it, and thus it falls to me to slap a number on this thing and tell you that you owe it to yourself to spend a couple of hours exploring the fictional Yorkshire town of Barnsworth.

Technically we're in adventure game territory, but it has little in common with its joke-filled compatriots like Monkey Island and Sam & Max. You'll find no tricky conundrums or pixel-hunting puzzles here. Instead, playing as a nameless, voiceless, dogsbody of inconsistent size—allowing you to, say, explore a disturbing meat dimension inside a slab of ham—you'll mostly be finding yourself at the centre of increasingly bizarre skits.

Your task is to help the eccentric residents of Barnsworth with simple problems. Typically, the solution amounts to simply pushing forward, exploring this weird cartoon reality and embracing its lunacy. Sometimes you'll jump on something, knock another thing over, or give someone a playful slap. There's no inventory management to take you out of the world. Rather, you're like a child, randomly touching things with your sticky fingers to see what will happen.

Despite the absence of headscratchers, though, solving problems in Thank Goodness You're Here! is just as satisfying, if not more so, than it is in a traditional adventure game—such is the power of the jokes and their pay-offs.

One task sees you helping a new bed-ridden pal do their shopping, which immediately becomes a ridiculous escapade when you realise that their hand will be accompanying you, as their increasingly long arm slithers across Barnsworth. Inside the shop, you'll need to find the perfect soup for them, but it's just another excuse for a lark as you cause a terrible mess on the shelves and revel in some very silly product names, like "Tiny Tom's Tinned Pie" and "Herbert's Lovely Boy Soup". Knocking a tin of "Soup To Push" into the trolley, your pal—talking through their hand—will complain that it's "too meta".

Barnsworth is a small town, but you'll do several loops of it, giving the game the opportunity to create some brilliant running gags. God, there are so many great ones, full of escalating madness. But my favourite has to be the use of a chimney as a shortcut, covering a poor old fella's living room in soot, time and time again. The way the homeowner becomes resigned to their fate, trapped in a filthy cycle, endlessly tidying their home only for a tiny man to ruin it without offering even a single apology, it's slightly tragic. But mostly very funny.

Developer Coal Supper works comedy magic with this tiny scope, filling each loop with bizarre asides, new gags and weird detours. You'll find yourself shrinking down to the size of a rodent to briefly explore a society of rats one minute, then the next, you'll be treated to a cutscene that explains why the grocer with the huge noggin is so angry, delving into his past traumas and broken marriage. Scale and perspective are constantly being played with, both being almost pathologically inconsistent, but everything is tied together by one central objective: making you laugh.

The tone is cheeky and often veers into the puerile—plenty of cartoon violence and jokes about bodily functions—and along with the art style this gives Thank Goodness You're Here! strong Viz vibes. For the uninitiated (and outside of the UK, that's probably most of you), Viz is a long-running adult comic that serves as a rude alternative to the likes of The Beano and Dandy. The surrealism and occasional dark undertones, meanwhile, call to mind fellow Northern comedy The League of Gentleman.

One crucial difference, though, is that Thank Goodness You're Here! is never mean-spirited, nor does it set out to shock—though it's certainly full of surprises. Barnsworth might be filled to the brim with lunatics, but it's never anything less than warm and welcoming. It's steeped in colloquialisms and geographically specific oddities, but it's not a million miles away from Parks and Rec's Pawnee, Indiana.

It might be harder for players outside of the UK to connect with, but none of its gags are really exclusionary. If you've ever laughed at Monty Python, I Think You Should Leave, Aunty Donna—basically any surrealist sketch show—you're probably going to have a great couple of hours slapping your way through Barnsworth.

Indeed, a lot of effort went into getting the jokes to work in different languages, from Brazilian Portuguese to Simplified Chinese, since so many of them don't really make sense in a straight translation. But the concept of a small post-industrial town full of oddballs is pretty universal. Besides, when you're dealing with a game as strange as Thank Goodness You're Here!, everything doesn't have to make complete sense.

The lunacy, though, belies how tightly structured it is, as it funnels you through sketch after sketch, ensuring that no space or character is wasted. It is meticulously designed to evoke an absurd number of laughs per minute. And when it's over, you'll be pleasantly exhausted. It is so rare in games for something to give itself entirely to the noble pursuit of leaving us in stitches, and Thank Goodness You're Here! does so with such skill and glee that it's impossible to avoid becoming smitten.