Games Don’t Get Funnier than Thank Goodness You’re Here

By Garrett Martin | August 1, 2024 | 3:30pm

Video Games Reviews thank goodness you're here

Games Don’t Get Funnier than Thank Goodness You’re Here

Humor is subjective. If you don’t find Thank Goodness You’re Here funny, though, you objectively suck.

At least, you know, in my opinion.

Thank Goodness You’re Here, a surreal puzzle-platformer where comedy takes precedence over everything else, is a game like none other. Imagine if peak Monty Python somehow made an Adult Swim show in the 2000s, except it was a game and not a show, and featured Matt Berry giving another impeccable Matt Berry performance. The “puzzles” are less about challenging you and more just a framework for bizarre little comedy sketches, pretty much all of which are absolutely hilarious. And it smartly ends well before it starts to wear out its welcome, after only two or three hours. It’s basically a perfect game if you share its sense of humor, and if you don’t share its sense of humor, you’re probably a bit of a bore. (Sorry.)

In Thank Goodness You’re Here you play a stranger in a rustic, provincial British village, a mute little yellow guy who changes size constantly for no reason beyond the needs of a scene and the sheer absurdity of it all, and helps the community with a litany of problems through the only action you’re able to perform: quick little punches. Need to help a chain smoking fishmonger prepare his display window? Run around punching fish until cigarettes pop out of their mouths. Got to help the village publican clean out his draft lines? Take a quick trip down the drain of his sink and pummel all the kegs in his basement until they’re working smoothly again. Finding a bakery’s keys, fixing a chippy’s fryer, corralling sentient meat with depressing childhood stories into a butcher’s sausage maker? All fists. Jab it out.

Most Popular

(Don’t worry: not everything you have to do is about food. Like “Weird Al” Yankovic, Thank Goodness You’re Here does love its food jokes, though.)

Thank Goodness You're Here

Thank Goodness You’re Here excels with its ludicrous situations and whimsical, cartoonish art style. It’s also just a brilliantly written game, with a canny eye for local dialect and speaking patterns, but also an inventive and inspired approach to using language. Many lines of dialogue are funny simply because of how they’re constructed, regardless of the character, context, or actual meaning of the words; for instance, when a local often seen eating hamburgers tells you that “it’s the meat in the bun of the burger that I enjoy,” it’s funny not just because it’s such an obvious statement, but because of the way that it’s written. The dialogue is rich throughout and maybe more off-kilter than the game’s scenarios or artwork. If you’re the kind of person who loves to quote Tim Robinson sketches or Monty Python lines, you won’t be able to resist this game’s writing.

It also helps that every voice actor does a wonderful job. Matt Berry might be the big name, and yes, he plainly relishes calling a tomato a “beautiful baby boy” in the most Matt Berry way possible. But every character here has a weird, funny, distinctive voice that adds greatly to the comedy, while also adding to the sense of this being a real community of neighbors with preexisting relationships and rivalries.

Beyond the wonderful writing and humor, it is still a game, though, and it smartly leans on those expectations to further its comic aims. Thank Goodness You’re Here uses the inherent repetition of games to set up a number of great running gags and show real character development for some of its ridiculous cast. A recurring bit where our yellow hero drops through a chimney to get to a different part of the village is both a fantastic piece of slow boil comedy but also a concise and effective study of a specific kind of British archetype. The budding love between two teen villagers working part time jobs is built subtly at first, before culminating in a squeamish but sweet bit of cringe comedy as they finally have a face-to-face late in the game. It uses that Metroid-y style of backtracking and repetition not to highlight your character’s growing power or flatter your increased mastery of the game, but to layer and expand on its jokes. (Your character doesn’t grow an inch in any way, and in fact is a completely empty and expressionless void from start to finish, which makes the way he’s embraced by the village even funnier.)

Again, though, humor is subjective. It’s entirely possible you won’t jive with what this game is doing, as basically every traditional marker of a game here is subservient to humor. If you don’t find Thank Goodness You’re Here funny, you’ll probably get very little out of it. And I’m sorry, but that’s your loss. For those who do share its sense of humor, and who appreciate its cartoon style and absurd parody of village life, Thank Goodness You’re Here is bound to impress. It’s one of the most purely enjoyable games I’ve ever played, and I’m thinking it will be as fun to revisit again and again as the great comedies it echoes.

Thank Goodness You’re Here was developed by Coal Supper and published by Panic Inc. Our review is based on the Switch version. It’s also available for PC, PlayStation 5, and PlayStation 4.

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, comedy, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. He’s also on Twitter @grmartin.