It’s not often that I watch the entire credits for a game, but as Thank Goodness You’re Here! finished I sat on my sofa for a good five minutes thinking “What the hell did I just play?” while the PS5 sang ‘On Ilkley Moor Bar t’At‘ at me.
It is probably the easiest game in the world to describe, at least mechanically. You can run about, jump, and punch things – a ‘slapformer’ as the developers like to call it – but you can’t pick things up, there’s no quest markers, and so you just scamper about and the story unfolds. Describing that story is rather more difficult: take a dash of The Fast Show, a pinch of The League of Gentlemen, a smidgen of Monty Python, and mix vigorously with a heap of saucy British seaside postcards from the 1980’s and you might be close.
You play an unnamed travelling salesman who is sent by his boss to the town of Barnsworth, a thinly veiled version of Barnsley in Yorkshire, to sell something to the Mayor. Sadly the Mayor is busy and our salesman must complete a series of bizarre tasks to help the townsfolk. These include helping a bedridden man get his shopping, finding some tools, and getting a cow some nice hot chips. That last mission may seem odd, but even the most straightforward of quests have bizarre solutions.
Of course, all you can do is wander about and punch things, so you’ll mainly be scampering around and looking for new pathways which are gradually revealed as you progress the story. The downside is that while your dialogue gives clues to solve tasks, there’s nothing more that, so if you take a break and forget what task was in hand you are going to be completely lost for a while. That said there’s always some new characters or dialogue to keep you amused. For example, two householders are arguing because one of them has put their wheelie bin in the other’s wheelie bin. As the game progresses they continue their argument taking it to ridiculous heights and end up playing cards… in the bin.
To explain any more would really spoil the game, but expect to encounter highly educated worms, extremely large pies, bird watchers looking for tits, fish with cigarettes, not to mention plenty of visual gags. Like all good comedies it also takes a turn to the darker side; I really wasn’t expecting body horror in the middle of this cutesy looking game, but it works really well.
The humour is quintessentially British and while their are quite a few risqué jokes, they do stay on the side of saucy postcards rather than full on filth. Still, even though a lot of the smuttier jokes will fly right over the heads of any younger players, it’s not exactly a paragon of family friendliness. There are one or two swear words written on bottles in the background and one perfectly timed and laugh out loud F-bomb, for one thing, while one scene finds a young man getting torrents of milk splashed over his face while another character makes, ahem, ‘encouraging’ noises.
However, as amusing as this all is, there is actually very little game to play. Thank Goodness You’re Here! is rigid and linear as one quest follows another – run to the place and punch something, you cannot deviate from the path and when you 100% the game in about two and half hours, it just resets and starts again. It reminded me of the classic ZX Spectrum game Jack the Nipper, but even that let you run multiple quests at the same time.
What’s more irritating is that there are clear opportunities to add some mini games, for example you get sent to collect some bubbles and the screen opens up with thirty or so bubbles bobbing about. “Aha, gotta collect them all!” you would think, but no, you just grab one single bubble and a long cut scene follows.
