Game Theory: Give two hours to one of the funniest comedy games in years

Thank Goodness You’re Here! is a hard game to describe—except to say that it’s the best comedy game we’ve played in the last few years.

Created by Will Todd and Jason Carbutt—who, along with an absolutely incredible team of animators and other artists, comprise the Coal Supper game studio—the new “absurd comedy slapformer” places you in the dapper little shoes of a small yellow man who’s been dispatched to a Northern English town pulled from the depths of ’80s British sitcoms. (If ’80s British sitcoms were cartoons with some of the most gorgeous animation we’ve ever seen in a video game.) While wandering around the town, you’re presented with a series of silly problems—the local handyman has had his tools stolen; a young boy wants milk for his tea; a bedridden man needs help with his shopping—that are then solved by smacking things and watching insane things happen in response. (The handyman’s tools have been hidden by rats! The bedridden man’s arm extends out from his body, winds blindly around the town, and eventually enters the supermarket through a skylight! The milk one is too weird to put in print!) Moving through the various portions of the town, you’re half instigator, half viewer, as every new slap to a new character produces some strange new bit of dialogue or comedy.

A comedy game is only as good as its jokes, so it’s lucky that Thank Goodness You’re Here! is genuinely funny, even as its comedy styles veer all over the road. As you explore chip shops, meat dimensions, and a bizarre rivalry between factions of pie-enjoyers, the comedy ranges from meta jokes about the structure of video games, to rapid-fire commercial parodies reminiscent of some of Rick And Morty‘s “multi-dimensional cable” bits, to more specific observations about some very narrow areas of classic British comedy.

It is, among other things, one of the only video games we would ever genuinely characterize as naughty—not evil, or perverse, or sick, or any number of other descriptors for bad behavior, but the sort of childish, tittering pursuit of mild salaciousness that is burned, in our minds, alongside memories of catching bits and pieces of old, mostly very boring episodes of Are You Being Served? on PBS when we were kids. Carbutt and his team have made a pretty profound exploration of that particularly British form of naughtiness here, parodying, exaggerating, and occasionally just recreating it as part of the game’s cavalcade of jokes and surreal scenarios.

Thank Goodness You’re Here! can, in fact, be viewed almost as a horror game about what being trapped in such a universe of innuendo, parochial problems, and endless tiny dramas might feel like—albeit one that’s also capable of provoking a laugh out loud, or a moment of genuine, profound confusion, every few minutes. The play (run around town, slap things, watch the jokes) is simplistic enough that it would eventually wear out its welcome, except the whole thing’s over in about 2.5 hours. Meanwhile, the pleasures continue to roll in: The perfect animations, the razor-sharp sense of comedic timing, the way repetition is employed to heighten jokes or build tension. It’s the rare comedy game that’s trying to be a joke machine first, and it’s shockingly well-served by that instinct. (Compare to that other game about being a small troublemaker imperiling a tiny, stereotypically British town, Untitled Goose Game; while that title is more clever in its play, it’s also beholden to its impulses to work as a series of challenges. TGYH!, freed of that compulsion, never has to worry about a gameplay element messing up the timing of a joke.)

What we have here, then, is a game that’s profoundly easy to recommend to anybody interested in this kind of rapid-fire, deliberately weird comedy, regardless of their general stance on gaming. Provided its sense of humor and yours have some neurons in common—and you have two and a half hours and twenty bucks to hand over to something truly strange—Thank Goodness You’re Here! will show you things you almost certainly haven’t seen before. It’s an insanely confident commercial debut from its creators. (Coal Supper previously released a free game, the surreal and horny-looking The Good Time Garden, which has just shot up to the top of our must-play list.) The unique is rare in gaming, a medium that relies on iterations and building on what’s come before; to be unique and hilarious is something of a minor miracle.

(Also, yes, before it drives you crazy the way it drove us crazy while playing: That is Matt Berry voicing the town gardener. Amazing!)