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Colin Clark

I’ve just woken from a fever dream. In it, I was a little yellow sales man who got roped into fixing the problems of an entire northern British town. I was sucked through beer lines, I fed a cow some chips (fries), I used butter to free a man’s arm from a storm drain, and I purchased spirit level bubbles. This fever dream is courtesy of Coal Supper, a two person indie development team, and our friends at Panic, the studio behind the Play Date.

Thank Goodness You’re Here! is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my 30 years of gaming. Humor in games is notoriously difficult to pull off. Absurdism and surrealism even more-so. I feel like we blessedly left the era of “lol omg so x random!” back in 2011 when mustaches and bacon were all the rage. TGYH! is not that style of absurdism. Because it actually works. Almost every single moment in this little gem of a game keeps you entertained with a smile on your face. I even literally laughed out loud three different times throughout my journey. The humor is distinctly British, and while I’m sure there are more than a handful of gaffs that flew straight over my head, the ones I did get were solid gut punches from a surrealist’s fist.

The format of TGYH! and the way you make progression is surreal in its own way. The town loops around on itself, so to go left (back) you have to go right (forward). If you want to get back to Mother Megg’s Buttery Goods in the starting area of town, you have to loop all the way back around to it from the right, eventually coming back up the tap lines in the local pub for the Nth time. To make this left to right progress you – every single time – have to get stuffed down a chimney chute, exploding out the house’s fireplace and covering the poor resident’s living room in a layer of ash. He cleans up the mess with a forced smile every time, but eventually succumbs to tears and resignation on your final violent re-entry.

The entirety of the game is made up of little vignettes which all give the town of Barnsworth a sense of life and vibrancy – in its own post-industrial North England way. You witness a blossoming teenage love story between the pie maker’s apprentice Florence and Colin, the delivery boy of Mother Megg’s shop. You help a boy find milk for his tea because he is – quote – “milk shy” and can’t get it himself by feeding chips to a depressed cow. At one point, the gardener is seen “shagging” a bag of fertilizer, which leads to the birth of his tomato son, which he then promptly consumes. In a main throughline, you retrieve the handyman Jasper’s “stolen” tools. It’s obvious he lost them himself, but he blames everyone around him for stealing them. While the game on the surface might seem like a series of fetch quests, it is so much more than that.

Every moment is filled with new discoveries, and on each loop the scenery changes little by little to tell a dozen different stories. One woman accuses her neighbor of throwing his trash in her bin. The situation escalates until on the final loop, both of them are stuffed in the garbage bin playing a hand of cards. Without experiencing the change on every loop first hand, it might seem impossible to grasp how that could happen, but these are the goings on you get used to in TGYH!

After about 30 minutes, my brain kind of ker-chunked into place and really started to understand and appreciate the level of nonsense TGYH! brings to the table. While I found it charming before that, it took a bit of time steeping my brain in the hot water of the game to really settle into the headspace Coal Supper asks of you. This, in large part, is thanks to the voice acting. Every character is voiced so charmingly you can’t help but become attached to the residents of Barnsworth. Matt Berry lends his distinct vocal talents to the game, bringing a level of validity to the short experience.

Let me be clear. Absurdism never really lands for me. I hate puns, and I generally find this style of comedy distinctly un-funny. I blame the autism. TGYH! however, lands properly on the side labeled “actually funny” for me. The game takes between two and three hours, and sits at $20 on Steam here, and it has been one of my most satisfying purchases of the year. It’s certainly not for anyone, but for those it works with, it truly shines. Comedy in games is almost impossible. TGYH! shows that it can be done right.