Thank Goodness You’re Here! is best experienced knowing as little as possible, but what you should know is that it’s one of the most roundly absurd games we’ve yet played. As a diminutive businessman, you’re sent out to meet with the mayor of Barnsworth. Turns out he’ll be unavailable for a while, and so, with a few hours to fill, you head out into the little northern English town, thus beginning an earnestly ridiculous adventure.
Your interaction with Barnsworth and its citizens is limited to jumping and slapping, but that’s enough to explore each contained area and see what they have to show. A series of increasingly odd tasks thrust upon you by the townsfolk provides a loose story of sorts, but we can’t recommend a thorough examination of the environments enough. Some of our favourite moments are the smaller ones off the main path. The game is only two or three hours long, but every part of it is packed with amusing details, visual gags, and genuinely funny dialogue. Sometimes it’s a little unclear where to go next, but arguably the lack of direction just means you’ll see more of it.
The humour here is classically British — dark, surreal, and downright strange scenarios mix into the mundanity of everyday life with a self-aware wit. It’s simultaneously the most unhinged game we’ve played in a long time and a brutally accurate dissection of small-town England. Despite this contrast, and one or two sequences that cross a line into the truly deranged, it upholds a cohesive tone throughout — mostly harmlessly silly, but with a lingering threat of diving headfirst into disturbing lunacy. It’s great.
The presentation is perfectly pitched. The art and animation style sits so well alongside the daft story and characters, while the music and sound are great too, all drunken horns and pleasant guitars. We do think, in its pursuit of a very clean look, it’s overlooked a couple of simple features. The option to quit to the main menu is missing, and a chapter select would’ve made revisiting favourite segments easier.
Still, despite some very minor drawbacks and a potentially short-lived novelty factor, Thank Goodness You’re Here! delivers exactly what it sets out to — a brilliantly twisted, unabashedly English comedy curio. If you’ve an appetite for this brand of off-the-wall nonsense, we can’t think of a game that does it better.