Thank Goodness You’re Here is one the best comedy games ever

Despite video games chasing the legitimacy of being like blockbuster Hollywood action films or HBO dramas, few of them take a pop at comedy as a genre. Thank Goodness You’re Here is a comedy game, and it’s a fantastic one.

Developer Coal Supper‘s second game is about the town of Barnsworth, a colourful, fictional northern English town. Players arrive seeking a meeting with the mayor, but they’re soon chucked out into the town square, with time to kill. Thankfully, Barnsworth is full to the brim with absurd characters with problems that only you can fix. Thank Goodness You’re Here!

Mechanically, you’re travelling around the town, doing odd jobs. Your character can run, jump, and punch. These mechanics are largely used to set in motion the game’s seemingly endless string of jokes. One quest sees you assisting a never-ending extendable arm as it snakes its way through the town. Once you solve a problem, that will unlock a new part of the town, and a new quest.

Like any great comedy, Thank Goodness You’re Here doesn’t outstay its welcome. We finished it in one three-hour sitting, and the recurring jokes and references are well suited to this condensed runtime. Each time you return to a part of the town you’ve already visited, there will be a new joke, a new side quest, or a new route to another new area.

It’s vital that you interact with every character (usually punching them) each time you visit a scene, as not only will they usually have new dialogue, but later jokes in the game land so much better when you’ve received the earlier setup.

There are also dozens and dozens of jokes that we entirely missed the first time through an area. For example, in one of the shops in the town, you enter the freezer at the back of the store. Displayed on a tiny square in the corner of the screen is a thermostat that says the fridge is a toasty 37C. There’s offensive graffiti everywhere.

Some jokes are less subtle, but just as funny. The local supermarket is called Price Shaggers. It’s a very stupid joke, but it made us laugh. It’s a joyously silly game. It’s a shameless, full-chested love letter to Monty Python and a prime candidate for one of the funniest games ever. It threads the needle perfectly between subtle, witty British humour and writing the word “nonce” on a wall.

The game is a visual treat, with heavy inspiration from Terry Gilliam, The Ricky Gervais Show, and Regular Show. Every character has vastly different dimensions, each new area of the town is more geographically impossible than the other, and the main character’s size changes as rapidly as the game fires new jokes at you.

“It’s a joyously silly game. It’s a shameless, full-chested love letter to Monty Python and a prime candidate for one of the funniest games ever.”

The voice acting is just as strong, with authentic, hilarious accents making the jokes feel authentic. Matt Berry, one of the most recognizable voices in UK comedy from the last two decades, makes an assured appearance. Berry could read the phone book and it would be funny, but his use in the game is perfectly measured, and always a lovely surprise when he reappears.

It’s difficult to think of any ways in which Thank Goodness You’re Here could be better. It absolutely nails everything that it sets out to achieve, and it’s easily one of the funniest games we’ve ever played. There are more brilliant jokes in the first five minutes of the game than most games with “funny dialogue” get in a full runtime.

Sure, your mileage may vary with the style of humour, and if you’re not from the UK, there’s virtually no way that you’ll understand all of the jokes, but you can’t tell us there’s not something universally funny about a big pie exploding.

A copy of Thank Goodness You’re Here! was supplied for this review.