Thank Goodness You’re Here Review

Thank Goodness You’re Here has very few contemporaries in the indie gaming landscape due to its fun melange of snappy situational comedy, stellar presentation and a rich, tightly packed world.

The Setup

At the start of the game, you’re asked to take a trip to the town of Barnsworth. As a very tiny salesman, you arrive early for a meeting with the mayor of this very small town. After being unable to get into your meeting early, you decide to explore the town and begin doing tasks for some of the local townsfolk. Most of these tasks begin innocuously but then things get weird.

The Punchline

Thank Goodness You’re Here is positioned as a comedy slap-former. You’ll wander through a small countryside British town and constantly find people who require help. Some of the time, these folks will greet you with a pleasant “Thank Goodness, You’re Here!” but others will just start to spew their problems at you. There’s also a third genre of problem (my personal favourite): the obvious ones. They’re impossible to miss as you walk by them. An example is one of the first tasks that you take on: freeing a man’s arm that’s stuck in a sewer storm grate.

The gameplay in Thank Goodness You’re Here is quite simple. Apart from movement, your little salesman can hop and slap. However, there’s no challenge in the platforming or slapping. How you advance the game’s narrative is by moving between areas, speaking to NPCs and occasionally fetching an item. The game’s main hubs are small but lively and every nook and cranny holds a laugh. The transitions between different sections of the map are inventive as well.

The playing part of Thank Goodness You’re Here is just a vehicle for the game’s comedy.

Thank Goodness for Small Town Livin’

Without knowing firsthand what it’s like to live in a small British town, I feel like the team at Coal Supper has done a masterful job at seemingly capturing the mundaneness of small-town Britain while making it quite funny. The humour is absurdist (almost Monty Python-esque) and uses a combination of fun shock and sketches. The game’s narrative flexes at times and gets dark or deeply horny. The horniness comes in the form of small actions like a police officer suggestively polishing his baton in the confines of his cramped police station. Sometimes it’s way more overt. It’s rated M for a reason; I would recommend not playing this one around kids.

Playing a Naughty Cartoon

One of the most impressive parts of Thank Goodness You’re Here is the transitions between funny vignettes and gameplay. To compliment the team to Coal Supper again, the game feels like the full realization of the vision of early quick comedy game creators from early Newgrounds. Your character will usually walk into a silly and surreal situation that you’ll be asked to lightly play through. The game’s final act, in particular, may be talked about as one of the funniest moments in games for the year. Even small moments like being forced down a chimney to dirty the home of a quintessentially middle-aged British man made me grin from ear to ear in a way that I’m sort of ashamed to admit. 

The entire game is just one big joke and it feels the entire time like you’re playing a cartoon made for adults. On a technical level, control is taken away from the player regularly for cutscene purposes. These animated vignettes load in instantly and lead in and out of gameplay magically.

Wander Away

Unfortunately, my complaints about this title stem principally from an experience of feeling at times both aimless and rigid. It’s also passive, but that just means that it won’t be a title for everyone. 

On the point of aimlessness, a little direction would have been appreciated. After bunking off from your very important meeting with the mayor at the start of the game, you have to intuit what to do next based on conversations with the townsfolk. Your options for advancing the narrative are seemingly limited because of the small scope of the experience, but I did still find myself wandering around, talking to everyone once or twice before triggering the next moment.

More than once, your next step is shared through a single line of NPC dialogue. Blink and you might miss a key detail on what to do next. This is not an issue on its own but the lack of mission logs, objective indicators or visual cues worsens the issue. Now I will say that a default to simplicity here is a choice that seems deliberate, but it will force you to poke around which may not please some players. 

I played this one for 2.2 hours on Steam Deck and at the end of the game, finished it very definitively. For most, replayability will be tough since the strength of gameplay comes in the game’s “bits” that won’t be as funny the second time around.

Thank Goodness You’re Here For My Final Thoughts

There are few games that I hope are adapted into a cartoon more than Thank Goodness You’re Here. Coal Supper has captured lightning in a bottle with their cocktail of irreverent, British and somewhat horny humour. However, its gameplay-lite in a way that may turn off some players looking for a more do-ey experience.

Final Score: 8.5/10

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A copy of the game was provided by the publisher for this feature. Reviewed on PC (Steam Deck). Coming August 1, 2024 to Mac, PC, PlayStation 4 + 5, and Nintendo Switch.

Price: $19.99 USD

Looking for another trip to a foreign land? Check out our recent review of Été!