HomeReviewsThank Goodness You’re Here!
Thank Goodness You’re Here! review: edges towards greatness and won’t take you long to beatCarry on
Carry on
Image credit:Coal Supper/Rock Paper Shotgun
Image credit:Coal Supper/Rock Paper Shotgun
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, butThank 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.
Thank Goodness You’re Here! - Reveal Trailer - Nintendo SwitchWatch on YouTube
Thank Goodness You’re Here! - Reveal Trailer - Nintendo Switch
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.
Image credit:Coal Supper/Rock Paper Shotgun
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 aplatformerwould 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.
Image credit:Coal Supper/Rock Paper ShotgunImage credit:Coal Supper/Rock Paper ShotgunImage credit:Coal SupperImage credit:Coal Supper
Image credit:Coal Supper/Rock Paper Shotgun
Image credit:Coal Supper/Rock Paper Shotgun
Image credit:Coal Supper
Image credit:Coal Supper
Image credit:Coal Supper/Rock Paper Shotgun
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.
