Thank Goodness You’re Here! review – a proper comedy gem

Thank Goodness You’re Here opens with an advert for Peans (“Not quite peas, not quite beans, but something delicious in betweens”) and finishes with a song. But developer Coal Supper’s absurdist comedy adventure is so relentlessly, gleefully unpredictable throughout – so improbably overstuffed with impeccable gags and surreal detours – it’s hard to know where to begin.

So let’s play it safe and start at the beginning. You are the hero of the piece – a nameless man of indeterminate age and wilfully inconsistent height – who, as the adventure opens, is sent on a work trip to the fictitious Northern England town of Barnsworth for reasons never entirely clear. At which point, Thank Goodness You’re Here immediately lets you know what kind of game it is by insisting you exit the boss’ office by jumping out the ten-storey window instead of the door. Cue a note-perfect montage of mid-20th-century archival footage – all coal mines, red brick houses, and dour-faced ladies scouring busy market stalls – as bawdy ditty The Marrow Song plinks out, and away we go.

Without wanting to get ahead of myself, Thank Goodness You’re Here is, I think, brilliant – a bold bit of masterfully orchestrated comedy that confounds expectations at every conceivable turn. Its very specific brand of surreal, anything-for-a-gag whimsy won’t be to everyone’s taste, but the way it merrily manipulates form to heighten its impeccable comedic rhythms is a true delight to behold – even if it takes a bit of time to show the method in its mayhem.

This is a very silly game, and from the moment you step outside Barnsworth’s town hall – to the first of many “Thank goodness you’re here!”s from a citizen in need – it doesn’t let up. Barnsworth itself is a wonderful creation, and there’s not an inch of its vibrantly grimy cartoon expanse – from its fag-strewn market square to its oozing riverbank – that doesn’t find room for a sight gag or two. As a world, it’s irresistible, pulling your attention in all directions at once with its overwhelming movement and detail; spiders boing jovially on lampposts, ants shimmy up walls, scruffy pigeons flutter and fuss, while children gaily beat each other with sticks, and a man champions asbestos on the street nearby. Coal Supper was founded by Barnsley locals and its portrayal of the post-industrial North is an affectionate one, playfully reimagining archetypal small-town spaces in something like picture book form – think Where’s Wally by way of Royston Vasey, if Wally got his willy out and was prone to the odd swear.

There’s a sort of storybook simplicity to Thank Goodness You’re Here’s interactions too. Your strange odyssey to satisfy Barnsworth’s community of oddballs – less a series of formal fetch quests as it is a string of loosely connected set-pieces – might grow increasingly outlandish as the day goes on, but your diminutive toolkit remains the same. You can walk, jump (for the occasional bit of light platforming in the transitional spaces between larger areas) and, most importantly of all, give stuff a wallop. Want to engage a local in conversation? Punch them in the arse. Want to open a door? Punch it on the knob. Want to palpate a cigarette-smoking haddock? You get the idea. It’s a strange, rather limiting choice at first – it takes a while to get used to the fact you progress conversations in exactly the same way you knock over a bin – but Coal Supper makes it work.

Virtually everything in Barnsworth reacts to your carefree violence, often in wonderfully unexpected ways, lending proceedings the same giddy joy of discovery you might get from prising back the flaps of a particularly anarchic pop-up book. Bin bags burst open, snails explode, buttocks quiver, owls pop out of tree trunks to regale you with wisdom (“Never give an owl a towel”), and there’s real pleasure to be had simply wandering about the town’s discrete locales seeing what mayhem can be slapped into existence next. It’s a clever way to encourage exploration in what are otherwise relatively confined spaces, counterbalancing Coal Supper’s need to keep a tight rein on proceedings in order to deliver its elaborate set-pieces and ensure its meticulously orchestrated jokes land with maximum force.

Structurally, Thank Goodness You’re Here is absolutely fascinating, essentially working on a geographical loop that funnels players forward through the same cycle of Barnsworth locations – park, pub, high street, rooftop, vegetable patch, and so on – over and over again. The first time you find yourself back at the start, it’s a little disappointing, seemingly betraying the game’s rather limited scope – but it soon becomes obvious there’s some clever stuff going on here. Thank Goodness You’re Here’s freewheeling whimsy might feel organic but there’s real craft behind its gags, and its structural repetition is precisely what makes its comedy work. Each loop builds on the last, reconfigured scenes setting up more punchlines, delivering more payoffs, and more often than not, slyly subverting expectations just as you think you’ve started to suss out its rhythms.

One minute you’ll be diving into a slab of beef to build a sentient patty from the memories of haunted meat, the next you’ll be dodging a tormented greengrocer while his entire long-headed life flashes before his eyes. You’ll run up the rafters of the local supermarket only to discover another, smaller supermarket for rodents in the ceiling; you’ll take a distended limb shopping while its owner stays in bed, feed a cow some chips to help a “milk shy” boy get his wish, and on it goes. Thank Goodness You’re Here is relentless in its invention – constantly switching perspectives and playstyles to frame its gags for maximum impact, abandoning quest lines only to suddenly pick them up again much later for a bigger laugh – and the end result is something like a pie-obsessed fever dream crossed with a bawdy beat poem. Honestly, it would be exhausting if it left any time to feel exhausted, but its gags and set-pieces are so finely honed, with such a big hit-to-miss ratio across its couple-of-hours playtime, it’s hard not to be completely engulfed in its mayhem, swept along by its daffy charms.

Thank Goodness You’re Here is, I should probably stress, often incredibly puerile, channelling an era of British comedy defined by saucy seaside postcards and Les Dawson skits (albeit without the more problematic bits of the age). “Every morning I like to start the day with a pint, then I do a big wee,” the local cobbler says at one point, “And then I get out of bed.” And if that doesn’t make you chuckle, this probably isn’t the game for you – but regardless of personal taste, it’s inarguably crafted with love, care, and impressive skill. It’s beautifully animated for one, and its voice cast (featuring the likes of Matt Berry and former Eurogamer contributor Jon Blyth) is reliably daft.

More than that, though, its gags, as silly as they may be, are delivered with genuine flair. One early moment, for instance, takes a simple task – mowing a lawn – and spins it into something marvellous, framing you and your mower far in the distance as two flowers express their undying love in the foreground. Each sweep of your control stick brings you incrementally closer, delaying the inevitable punchline to hilariously tortuous extremes. Thank Goodness You’re Here delves into the same well of invention time and time again, and it’s hard not to admire the audacity of it all.

If there’s a price to be paid for Thank Goodness You’re Here’s capriciousness, it’s that it absolutely has to be met on its own terms. By necessity, given its flagrant dismissal of logic and its wilfully unpredictable detours, its grip is tight, and its interactions are largely superficial. Your only real choice is to submit to its whims and let yourself be carried along on its wave of absurdity – but it’s so winning in its silliness, so unexpectedly life-affirming in its outrageousness, somehow conjuring a big-hearted sense of community from its absolute chaos, that submission is hardly a chore. Comedy is a relative rarity in video games, and it’s even rarer that it’s done this impeccably, irresistibly well. Coal Supper, thank goodness you’re here!

A copy of Thank Goodness You’re Here! was provided for review by Panic.