The shortest game, and the funniest
Thank Goodness You're Here!, two hours of pure comedy
- Critic score
- 89
- Player rating
- 4.6/5
- Main story
- 2.4 h
- Genre
- Puzzle, Platformer, Casual, Adventure
A game that does not last two hours and has no ambition to last longer. It wants one thing: to make you laugh, and it manages it better than anything else in the catalog.
You are a salesman passing through Barnsworth, a small town in the north of England. While waiting for your appointment you wander the place and meet the locals, who hand you a series of increasingly strange odd jobs.
The game describes itself as a slapformer: a platformer where most of the interaction consists of hitting things. You can jump, and you can slap. That is all. Almost every piece of scenery responds to that slap, usually out of all proportion, and progress consists of discovering what breaks.
All of its value sits in the writing and the drawing. The humour is specifically northern English — absurd, delivered in a thick accent, resting on a sense of nonsense that refuses to explain anything. A butcher with overreaching ambitions, a fishmonger in crisis, a pie of problematic size. Nothing is justified, and that is the point.
Visually it is a distorted cartoon, with stretched characters and saturated colours, animated with energy that never lets up. The sound work is equally remarkable: every object struck has its own noise, and the score feeds on your mischief.
Two hours, maybe three if you hunt for everything. It is short, it is deliberate, and it is exactly the sort of game a subscription lets you try without thinking — which you probably would not do if you had to buy it.