Thank God you’re here! review

Thank God you’re here! has an unwavering commitment to delivering the kind of laugh that makes a little pee come out. From the opening montage of surreal, whimsical and always slightly unnerving commercials to the anarchic musical number it ends on, there’s no time to breathe between all the giggling you’ll be doing. But it’s definitely worth the risk of choking from vomiting – it’s a petite price to pay.

We named it the best comedy game in our GOTY 2024 overdue last year, but for some reason we never got around to reviewing it, so it only behooves me to credit this game and say that you owe it to yourself for spending a few hours exploring the fictional town of Barnsworth in Yorkshire.

Technically, we’re in adventure game territory, but it has little in common with joke-filled compatriots like Monkey Island and Sam & Max. You won’t find any challenging puzzles or pixel hunting puzzles here. Instead, playing as a nameless, voiceless, irregularly sized dog body – allowing you to explore, for example, the disturbing dimensions of meat in a piece of ham – you’ll mostly find yourself at the center of increasingly strange skits.

Your task is to lend a hand the eccentric residents of Barnsworth with straightforward problems. Usually the solution comes down to simply moving forward, examining this strange cartoon reality and accepting its madness. Sometimes you jump on something, knock something over, or playfully slap someone on the cheek. No amount of inventory management will take you out of the world. You’re more like a child who randomly touches things with sticky fingers to see what happens.

However, despite the lack of head-scratchers, problem-solving in Thank God You’re Here! is as satisfying, if not more so, than a established adventure game – such is the power of jokes and their payoff.

One of the tasks involves helping your up-to-date, bedridden pal do some shopping, which immediately becomes a ridiculous escapade when you realize that his hand will accompany you as his increasingly long arm crawls around Barnsworth. At the store, you’ll have to find the perfect soup for them, but that’s just another excuse to joke around as you make a terrible mess on the shelves and enjoy very silly product names like “Tinned Pie Tiny Tom’s” and “Herbert’s Adorable Boy’s Soup.” When you throw a can of “Push Soup” into the cart, your buddy – talking through his hand – will complain that it’s “too meta.”

Barnsworth is a petite town, but you’ll make some loops through it, giving the game the opportunity to create some great gags. God, there are so many great ones, full of increasing madness. But my favorite is using the chimney as a shortcut, covering the indigent ancient man’s living room with soot every time. The way the homeowner has come to terms with his fate, trapped in a soiled cycle, endlessly cleaning his house only for the little man to ruin it without apologizing once is a bit tragic. But above all, very comical.

The creator of Coal Supper creates comedy magic with this little telescope, filling each loop with quirky asides, up-to-date gags, and strange detours. One minute you’ll be shrunk down to the size of a rodent to briefly explore a society of rats, and the next you’ll be treated to a cutscene explaining why a big-headed grocer is so irate, delving into his past traumas and broken marriage. Scale and perspective are constantly toyed with, both of which are almost pathologically inconsistent, but all united by one main goal: to make you laugh.

The tone is cheeky and often veers into the childish – lots of cartoonish violence and jokes about bodily functions – and combined with the art style it gives you a Thank God You’re Here! Viz robust vibration. For the uninitiated (and outside the UK, that’s probably most of you): Namely is a long-running adult comic that serves as a naughty alternative to the likes of The Beano and Dandy. Meanwhile, the surrealism and occasional murky undertones bring to mind another northern comedy, The League of Gentlemen.

One major difference, however, is that thank God you’re here! it’s never malicious or intended to shock – though it’s certainly full of surprises. Barnsworth may be filled to the brim with crazy people, but it is never less than sultry and affable. It’s steeped in colloquialisms and geographically specific oddities, but it’s not a million miles from Parks and Rec’s Pawnee, Indiana.

It may be harder for non-UK players to connect, but none of these gags are really exclusionary. If you’ve ever laughed at Monty Python, “I Think You Should Go Away, Aunt Donna” – basically any surreal sketch show – you’ll probably have a great time wandering around Barnsworth for a few hours.

Indeed, a lot of effort has been put into making the jokes work in a variety of languages, from Brazilian Portuguese to Simplified Chinese, because many of them don’t make sense in a straightforward translation. But the concept of a petite post-industrial town full of weirdos is quite universal. Besides, when you’re dealing with a game as weird as Thank God You’re Here!, not everything has to make perfect sense.

However, the madness lies in its tight structure, as it guides you through sketch after sketch, making sure that no space or character is wasted. It has been carefully designed to produce an absurd number of laughs per minute. And when it’s over, you’ll be pleasantly exhausted. It’s so scarce in gaming that something completely commits itself to the noble pursuit of leaving us in stitches, and thank God you’re here! he does it with such skill and joy that it is impossible to avoid admiration.