Thank Goodness You're Here!

You are a small man. Not metaphorically small. Not [i]"lacking in ambition"[/i] small. Physically, structurally, cosmically small — a tiny briefcase-wielding salesman dispatched to the fictional Northern English town of Barnsworth to meet with the mayor about a business matter that is never, at any point, explained. What are you selling? Nobody knows. Why does it matter? It doesn't. The mayor is behind a very thick door being very busy, and so you do what any reasonable professional would do when their meeting gets pushed: you wander out into the street and immediately become every local resident's personal errand monkey. [i]"Thank goodness you're here,"[/i] they all say, with the desperate relief of people who have been slowly losing their minds waiting for a tiny stranger to arrive and slap their problems into submission. And that is, functionally, the entire game. You slap things. You jump on things. Occasionally you slap things while jumping. Barnsworth is saved, one greasy task at a time. [b][u]The Good:[/u][/b] If Terry Gilliam had gotten into a heated argument with a saucy seaside postcard, lost badly, and then decided to make a video game about it — this would be the result. [i]Thank Goodness You're Here![/i] operates on pure, weaponized British absurdism. The humor doesn't wink at you. It doesn't pause to make sure you got the joke. It just keeps moving, completely straight-faced, absolutely committed to the bit — exactly like the Monty Python cast delivering the most deranged material imaginable with the composed energy of men reading a weather forecast. The whole thing is structured like a perfectly written sketch show. Each area of Barnsworth is its own little comedy grenade — pull the pin, watch it go off, walk away before the smoke clears. One moment you're helping a man whose arm has apparently decided to extend itself across the entire town like some sort of flesh-based public transit system. The next you're being shoved down a chimney for the fourteenth time while the man at the bottom develops what can only be described as a clinical anxiety disorder in real time. None of it is explained. None of it needs to be. This is the Black Knight school of narrative: just keep going, absolutely refuse to acknowledge anything is wrong, and trust that commitment to the absurdity IS the punchline. The art style looks like someone animated a fish and chips wrapper and somehow made it beautiful. Every character is a lovingly rendered grotesque — the sort of person Monty Python would have cast as [i]"Townsperson Who Has Very Strong Opinions About Gravy."[/i] The music sounds like a brass band that started the gig sober and is now deep into its third pint and genuinely having the time of its life. Matt Berry is in it, doing Matt Berry things with his voice, which means at minimum two scenes will cause you to pull a muscle laughing. The game also accomplishes something genuinely rare: it is tightly structured chaos. The madness has load-bearing walls. Behind every deranged task and every aggressively weird character is a joke architecture so well-engineered that you'll finish a bit, sit in stunned silence for two seconds, and then start laughing thirty seconds later when your brain finally processes what just happened. Very much the Spanish Inquisition approach — nobody expects it, and that's precisely the mechanism. [b][u]The Bad:[/u][/b] The game is two to three hours long. Two. To three. Hours. You will finish this game before a proper Sunday roast is ready. You will finish this game before your laundry is done. You will finish this game, stare at the credits, and feel the specific grief of a man who has just eaten the best pie of his life and realized he ordered the small. The developers packed it with enough comedy per square inch to fuel a full-length feature film, and then apparently got distracted and forgot to make more of it. A second play through will likely be required if you want to get all achievements. There's also no option to quit to the main menu from inside the game, which is the kind of UI oversight that suggests the development team spent so much energy making sure every single joke landed perfectly that at some point someone said [i]"right, menus, someone else handle that"[/i] and nobody did. Additionally — and this is crucial — if British puerile humor is not your native comedy language, this game will feel like showing up to a party where everyone is laughing uproariously at an inside joke you will never, ever be let in on. There are innuendos. There is cartoon violence. There are jokes about bodily functions delivered with the sincerity of a doctor delivering results. If you watched the Cheese Shop sketch and thought "I simply do not understand why this is funny," close the tab now. Barnsworth is not for you. Go play something with waypoints and a serious lore document. [b][u]Final Verdict:[/u][/b] [i]Thank Goodness You're Here![/i] is one of the funniest games ever made, and if that sentence sounds like hyperbole, I invite you to explain the cow and hot tub sequence to me using calm, reasonable language and we'll see how that goes. It is short. It is silly. It is proudly, structurally, load-bearingly silly — the kind of silly that contains more truth about the peculiar horror of small English towns than any documentary ever commissioned by the BBC. It knows exactly what it is, it executes that thing with the precision of a comedy team that has clearly studied the masters, and it ends before it can possibly overstay its welcome. Much like a Monty Python sketch, it arrives, commits every conceivable atrocity against your expectations, and then walks briskly off camera while you're still trying to figure out what you just watched. The Knights Who Say Ni would respect it enormously. The Black Knight would call it a flesh wound and demand more content. He would be right, but also he has no arms, so his opinion carries limited weight. 10/10 — Would be roped into unclogging a deep fryer again.

most games have such a hard time being intentionally funny, while this consistently got me laughing out loud while playing it. incredible game, you can’t get much better than this

this game is so british that i had to ask my friend who has a Scottish family to tell me why the jokes were funny. incredible game, so funny. why doesnt everyone make games this funny? when are they coming out a sequel "Thank goodness you were there!" and it will be a retrospective on "Thank goodness you're here!" and replay it at a different perspective. I think first-person would best. 10/10