Nate Hermanson

Jul 317 min read

REVIEW: This game slaps - Thank Goodness You're Here

There's something about British humor. The matter of fact plain speak sarcasm. The dryness in delivery. The absurdity played off as normalcy. Whether it's the chaotic shenanigans of comedians going off the rails on shows like Taskmaster or the dry befuddlement of Scottish comedian Limmy's skits, Brits are responsible for some of my most painful laughing fits.

Gaming has had some unabashed British humor representation over the years. Fable comes to mind as one of the most mainstream examples, but our friends across the pond may have a new champion in the form of the indie "silly slapformer," Thank Goodness You're Here.

With its fuck around and find out approach to storytelling, Thank Goodness You're Here is a delight for fans of all kinds of humor, but if you prefer tea and taking trips to the loo, it's especially the game for you.

An animated GIF of Thank Goodness You're Here. It shows various scenes of a tiny yellow man in a business suit walking through a town. It starts in a garden, with the man walking past a gardener with a hose. Then the tiny man is seen in a marketplace, running up to a stand and smacking it down. After that, he can be seen walking through a town square where various folks seem to be circling a person whose arm is stuck in a drainage gate.

Just the Facts

Developer: Coal Supper

Publisher: Panic

Platform(s): PC, PS5*, Nintendo Switch *denotes platform reviewed on

Price: $19.99

Release Date: August 1, 2024

Review key provided by publisher via Panic.

Thank goodness it's funny

Coming off of their free and much fleshier take on the "slapformer" in 2019's The Good Time Garden, Coal Supper decided to... well... flesh out the experience with their first commercial release in Thank Goodness You're Here. Five years in the making, this hand-drawn adventure caught people's eyes with its cartoony presentation, slap-forward interactions, and a general chaos reminiscent of Panic's previous "lil' guy ruins a small town of regular folks" adventure, the Untitled Goose Game.

In Thank Goodness You're Here, the tiniest salesmen you've ever seen is sent out on the road to the fictional town of Barnsworth. His task? Sell whatever it is his company has to offer. What he does? Anything but that.

You see, he might not be the best salesman, but he's certainly a helpful guy, and the people of Barnsworth can feel that. Our little salesman ends up helping with random tasks all throughout town: helping a man get his stuck arm out of a grate, gathering tools for a mechanic who's trying to fix up a fryer for the local fish-and-chips shop, and directing a guy's really long arm on his way to the supermarket. Normal stuff. Everyday tasks with a dash of silly make up the majority of the story here, as you endear yourself to the locals and wait to meet with the mayor throughout the game's 2-3 hour run.

What Coal Supper have here is an experience that isn't a laugh a minute, but instead a laugh per square inch. Everything the game does is in some effort to make you laugh, no piece of real estate wasted. From the bouncy butts you can smack to the names of businesses that you otherwise don't interact with — like the motionless van you find in the corner of the town square attributed to Tony's Parked Vans Limited "Never Caught Moving" — the detail work in service of comedy here is top notch. Not all of it will hit for you, but something will break through eventually. Because Thank Goodness You're Here knows how to keep catching you off guard with its evolving comedy.

One of my favorite bits in comedy comes from the improv world, in the games that see people riffing on one prompt. Taking a simple joke concept and adding on unnecessary layers that see it wrap from funny to unfunny and all the way back around again. Thank Goodness You're Here puts on a masterclass with the way its world and jokes evolve from beginning to end. As you explore Barnsworth, you'll be revisiting a lot of the same spaces again and again, and each time you do, jokes you saw the first time have always changed in some way.

In one of my favorite examples, you witness these two neighbors bickering about using the other's trash bin. "Don't put your rubbish in my bin." Then you come back and one of them is in the trash bin. "Don't put me in your bin!" Cycle through again? One of the bins is in the other bin. "Don't put your bin in my bin!" And it just keeps going.

It's not only a funny bit, it's a way to witness actual change in the town around you. It's a way to keep using a small setting in refreshing ways, making each time you circle through the Barnsworth haunts a delight as you wonder how they topped the last bit. Sometimes it's as simple as the most matter of fact end point to these layered exchanges, sometimes it's the most absurd thing in the world. And, almost always, it provokes a laugh.

...an experience that isn't a laugh a minute, but instead a laugh per square inch. Everything the game does is in some effort to make you laugh, no piece of real estate wasted.

As advertised though, Thank Goodness You're Here is chock-full of very British humor, a specific niche that does make it a more singularly enjoyable experience. Your laugh mileage may vary, but I think there's enough general silliness to be found regardless.

Playing Thank Goodness You're Here feels like channel surfing as a child and ending up catching some weird British cartoon on Adult Swim at four in the morning that you didn't know existed. Hearing people feud over the size of their meat pasties, giggling over drunkard Brit stereotypes, and blushing at milk-based exposure therapy? It can't be beat.

An in-game screenshot of Thank Goodness You're Here. A tiny yellow man with tufts of orange hair and a simple business suit is being held into the air by a man wearing a top hat. A crowd of other folks raise their hands in support to cheer the tiny man on. The tiny man has an indifferent look on his face.

Thank goodness slapping is satisfying

Most of playing Thank Goodness You're Here is just you running about the scene, slapping everything in sight, trying to see what kind of chaos you can get up to. Almost everything reacts to your slap: some of it is purely for a giggle, some for progression. It's almost reminiscent of the point-and-click adventure games Humongous Entertainment made for kids, where most of the fun came in just seeing what stuff did when you clicked on it.

Beyond the small bits of surprisingly satisfying "slapforming," as the devs call it, there are smaller contextual minigames that pop up, having your obliging lad get down and dirty to help the townsfolk with their needs. Most are pretty basic: tap some buttons, navigate through some unique movement puzzle, find the right thing to slap to move forward. I kept waiting for some more involved minigame to reveal itself, but in the end, these smaller moments did enough to break up the flow and freshen things up. Seeing a few repeated concepts was a little disappointing, especially when you see the jokes and the world evolving in genuinely surprising ways, but it's still a fun time.

There's a fun almost nonlinearity to the experience that sees you looping through Barnsworth, unlocking new shortcuts back and forth as you finish each task for the townsfolk, then finding new paths through the loop and new places to slap your way through. It feels natural, the way you stumble through the town and back again.

This is the kind of game that's just three hours with a smile plastered on your face, a hearty chuckle now and again, and a constant "oh my god that's so dumb but I love it" floating above you.

An animated GIF of Thank Goodness You're Here plays a variety of chaotic scenes in quick succession. A man bursts out of a dumpster in an alley, a tiny yellow man drops out of a fireplace shooting soot everywhere, a giant long sausage bursts out of a butcher's sausage maker, a tiny man hangs from a laundry line, a shopkeep throws his hands into the air dramatically, a tiny man walks along a store's fish display, that same man falls onto a garden shed, and finally, a large man kicks open his home's door with bags in his hands.

Thank goodness it looks real good

As a hand-drawn and animated experience, there's a fluidity to the motions here, such that nothing feels like part of a canned animation cycle. You don't see easy seams or loops. That's a major reason this accomplishes that cartoon you get to play experience, with constant moments of "oh wait, I'm in control right now."

Coal Supper's distinctive art style suits the silly rounded bodies of Barnsworth's townsfolk and their solid block coloring gives it that uncomplicated cartoon-y look. It's a stunning artistic achievement in that way.

On console, there did seem to be a strange blurriness over everything with my PS5 outputting to a 1440p screen. On PC, I'm almost certain it'd scale better and look as perfectly clear as you'd hope, especially on a native 1080p screen, but it still feels like something to note.

But I can't finish writing about Thank Goodness You're Here without talking about its voice cast. One of the game's major marketing points ahead of launch was the fact that they'd recruited the famous Matt Berry (What We Do in the Shadows, Gareth Marenghi's Dark Place) to voice Barnsworth's gardener. His much beloved voice is used to great effect, delivering double entendres with ease ("I've been sucking this pipe all morning and I haven't got a drop out of it" — referring to his hose, of course) and beautiful non sequiturs with his signature definitive comic confidence. But what really amazed me was how much the rest of the cast met the bar set by Berry.

Beyond Berry, the cast is made up of comedians, animators, and writers from throughout the UK. Many of them are relatively unknown for those not deeply embedded in the comedy scene across the pond, but they're just as pitch perfect as Berry in their roles.

Thank Goodness You're Here's entire cast meets the moment.

Comedy, especially British comedy with its dry absurdity, lives and dies by how it's performed. When you're meant to buy into competing pie peddlers, a big-headed vegetable salesman in crisis, and a pair of sisters who spend the entire game finding new ways to call each other bitches, performance goes a long way. And whether it's a simple grunt after being slapped or an entire joking monologue, Thank Goodness You're Here's entire cast meets the moment.

Shoutout to the subtitle options offering both "English" and "Dialect," the former translating the local dialect into more understandable English ("I'll tell your mo" turns into "I'll tell your mother") and the latter preserving the dialect as spoken. A fun "accessibility" angle here, particularly for those not as culturally savvy.

An in-game screenshot of Thank Goodness You're Here. Down a hole in the earth, a small bright yellow-skinned man falls to the bottom, dropping out of a bucket. Various pieces of trash can be seen at the bottom, embedded in the dirt. A pair of eyes is peeking from the side of the hole's wall. A pipe sticks out of the dirt at the bottom of the hole.

Thank Goodness You're Here continues the legacy of great comedy games with a simple yet satisfying platformer that embraces all aspects of British comedy. We always have complicated conversations about whether or not games have to be fun, what games are allowed to do and say with their stories, and so on. Games like Thank Goodness You're Here — games that keep things simple and silly — are reminders of how joyous video games can be when they are so dedicated to making you smile, to making you laugh.

And, I mean, any game that asks you to slap as many cheeks as this deserves some love.

Video Games Are Good and Thank Goodness You're Here is . . . GREAT. (8.5/10)

+ densely packed with laughs, simple and satisfying "slapforming," an incredible voice cast that meets the moment

- strangely low res on console, a few repeated gameplay concepts in an otherwise tiny package, British comedy not for everyone

The key art for Thank Goodness You're Here. Against blue skies, a collage of characters from the game can be seen. Characters of various skin colors, pink to yellow to a sickly green, can be seen in various poses related to their jobs. A gardener flails a hose and a chimney sweep holds her brush aloft, for example. In the center, a tiny yellow man with tufts of orange hair who wears a suit, is being tossed into the air and sits directly under the game's title. Butterflies flank the game's title on either side.

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