Thank Goodness You're Here! review: edges towards greatness and won't take you long to beat
Carry on
British comedy is too often defined by its relationship to America: either as merely irony and sarcasm, which we're told Americans don't understand, or as a sprightly ideas factory for works such as The Office, which Americans can bless by re-making at scale.
Peel back the curtains of American cultural hegemony however and you may find the true pulsing core of British comedy that lies beneath: innuendo. No American network is in a bidding war to import Vic and Bob or remake Bottom, and Carry On and Benny Hill are assumed to be anachronisms in our modern times, but Thank Goodness You're Here! enters the conversation with a nudge and a wink. It's a cheeky 2-3 hour adventure through a small northern town, and it's here to educate the entire world of our nation's obsession with sausages and bare bottoms.
You play as a businessman with no name, sent to meet with the mayor of a town called Barnsworth that "needs what we're selling". Upon arrival, nearly every resident greets you with the same refrain: thank goodness you're here! You're swiftly embroiled in the problems of the locals: a man with his arm stuck down a drain, a local pie maker who has run out of meat, a colony of rats living above the supermarket, and much more.
Helping means wandering around the colourfully drawn squares, markets, alleyways and shops of Barnsworth and slapping everything and everyone. There are jokes all over, too, delivered by every character and scrawled in every inch of scenery. Even when it wasn't making me laugh out loud, it was still a comedy universe I was delighted to spend time within.
Nothing ruins a joke like explaining it, but as a reviewer I feel compelled to give you a preliminary lick of the lollipop, so here's two. One of the shops in the first area you visit is called Nick's Brick's, and it's closed, with a steel shutter down to protect the shopfront. Nick opens the shutters to reveal the shop is just a brick wall.
There's a poster at the supermarket that reads "Porky Nobbers: That Wet Crunch!". If you're not the type of person to simply enjoy the mindfeel of a phrase like "Porky Nobbers", maybe this game isn't for you. ("Porky Nobbers: Extra Large" reads another nearby package.)
Your indiscriminate slapping will eventually find the trigger for the next scene or setpiece, and the story will progress. Occasionally this will lead you to scenes in which you must use your only other available verb, jump, to climb an area, but to call TGYH a platformer would be an overstatement. "Puzzle game" is stretching it, too. This is nearly pure narrative, its pleasures all to be found in its writing and animation.
The final ingredient to which is surrealism, which comes in part from your character's seemingly flexible size. Under normal circumstances your silent protagonist is about knee-height, but that doesn't stop him from being poured from a beer tap or visiting a microscopic meat world. Plus, animals can talk, and several characters possess supernatural physical properties. None of this is ever explained - thank goodness.
All of which led me to think a lot about Sarah And Duck, a CBeebies animated series with a similarly northern cast of vegetable obsessives and dreamlogic storytelling. TGYH isn't suitable for kids - maybe, probably - but the beauty of innuendo is that much of what's rude about it would simply pass them by. More significantly for us adults, the childlike surrealism steers it away from the cynicism that's often part of the bum-and-bap obsessed package, a la Viz. Spiritually, Thank Goodness You're Here! is more in line with Local Hero, but with winkies.
I did feel, at times, a kind of restlessness, an urgent need to slap my way to the next joke or new area. Not knowing how to access that next moment of novelty feels like death to me in a game like this, like reading a book and finding the remaining pages glued shut. But that happened only once in TGYH! and only briefly. Overall, even as someone who doesn't typically gel with visual novels and the like, the story here was enough. Its brief vignettes stack up, characters return again and again, until it builds to a grand climax.
By the time its end was away, I was convinced that Thank Goodness You're Here! deserves its place among the canon of British comedy, particularly that which celebrates the bumpkins of our better selves, from Wodehouse to Wallace & Gromit to the Cornetto trilogy. Heck, I haven't even mentioned that it's got Matt Berry doing voices in it. Send it to an American in your life, to show them there's more on our list of cultural exports than irony and failed politicians.
This review is based on a review build of the game provided by the developer.