Indie Game of the Week 480: Thank Goodness You're Here!
by mento
Indie games have long since become a truly global scene where the next big hit could from come anywhere around the world. Instead of covering any of those, though, Mento barely had to leave the house to bump into the paean to North Englishness that is Thank Goodness You're Here!.
Thank Goodness You're Here is something I'd had my eye on since it was released, since it was a comedic adventure game that was getting a lot of positive press for actually being funny, which is rarer than you might expect in this medium. However, this particular comedy game hits even closer to home, literally, as it so happens that I too am from... The North. (Imagine an ominous peal of thunder going off in the distance as I say this.) Affectionately taking the piss, as we say, about the northern half of the country (or the northern half of the most southern country within the UK, anyway) the game's one that has plenty of surface-level physical humor that anyone can appreciate but just as many very specific cultural jabs at this particular region of the world and its colorful inhabitants. I wonder if, for most, the funny accents and references to tuppences and thruppences just add a naturalistic layer to the humor before you even get into wordplay like the Japanese-by-way-of-Yorkshire TCG "You-Gi'-O'er".
Something I appreciate about this developer is that they had ample opportunities to make people from North England seem physically repellent, yet were able to resist the low-hanging fruit. (Besides, looking at our obesity rates it's clear we tend to ignore pretty much any fruit, low-hanging or otherwise.)
TGYH has you play as the human equivalent of a Nuprin (i.e. little, yellow, different) tasked with going to the eccentric town of Barnsworth to convince its mayor to purchase your company's product (both of which also go nameless). Faced with the prospect of waiting for hours in the city hall lobby, the protagonist leaves to explore the town and keeps getting dragooned into helping the local citizenry with minor errands and problems. The game has a circuitous format where you'll cycle through the same locations several times, albeit with some changes typically instigated by the player directly or indirectly, but you'll inevitably end up completing the tasks given to you one way or another. This means that, despite the veneer of an adventure game, you very rarely need to do anything specific to complete your goals beyond following the path in, through, under, and over Barnsworth that is laid out in front of you. Your sole way of interacting with the world is by kicking things, prompting dialogue from NPCs and creating random ancillary acts of vandalism, and you can also jump and push items around for some simple platforming challenges. The crux of the game is to funnel you from one humorous situation to the next, interrupting with skits and other surreal flights of fancy. This simplicity is core to its wider appeal, I suspect, since it feels more like a roller coaster ride of jokes rather than mechanics and puzzles that threaten to drag the whole affair down if the player gets stuck, and nothing is more deleterious to comedy than having the timing be all off.
TGYH seems inspired by a few surreal sketch comedy shows here in the UK that I can recall, especially those by Reeves and Mortimer (whom adopted the surrealist energy of Monty Python better than most and juxtaposed it with typically Northern deadpan stoicism) and The Young Ones, but also a satirical publication over here called Viz Magazine that sort of brought in all those raised on kids' comic anthologies like the Beano whom wanted something a little more... well, "mature" doesn't sound quite right, but certainly adult-oriented. While TGYH is technically appropriate for all-ages it frequently deals in the time-honored British comedic device of innuendo, including several occasions an item appears that is meant to be a penis (including several times where it actually is a penis). Actually, this probably isn't suitable for kids either. They'd crack up at it all the same though, given most of the gags emerge from kicking a thing often enough.
The thing is... I know they tried to pass off a Cockney chimney sweep as a northerner purely to ragebait players like me, so I refuse to rise to the provocation, my old china.
TGYH is a hard game to dislike because it is genuinely funny, adroitly alternating between double entendre, sarcasm, physical comedy, surreality, background visual gags, schadenfreude, those so-called "brick jokes" where the set-up and punchline might be hours apart, and plenty of Matt Berry's delivery raising already strong material even higher. It's near impossible to get stuck because of the game's format, where at most you'll spend a couple of minutes figuring out which door to go through or hole in the ground to drop down (and alternative routes are always getting shut down to help narrow down the critical path, usually the case of a recurring learner driver getting stuck in alleyways), but on the other hand the game really has zero challenge to it and very little replay value, beyond looking for the incidental background humor you may have missed last time or some of the more obtuse achievement targets. Roller coaster is how I put it earlier, and while I can understand making an adventure game in this format where the purview is to tell jokes effectively rather than frustrating players for hours by giving them the runaround—and, really, extending a game's surreal sense of humor to some germanely moon logic adventure puzzles really hasn't gone down well with other comedic adventure games in the past—it can call to mind that oft-delivered criticism of "why couldn't this have been a TV show or movie instead?".
Anyway, despite some misgivings I appreciate this game on a deeply fundamental level the same way I might Horace or Lumo in that it was made by people from my neck of the woods and approximate age range and aimed squarely at other people from that neck of the words and age range, namely me. It's entrenched in the type of humor I grew up around, set within a quirky town similar to the one I was born in, and yet found global approbation despite the specificity of its cultural references and certainly its odd (to anyone not from around here) dialect—I noticed in the credits that the game had been localized into several international languages including Chinese and Japanese, and I have no idea how they would've translated half of the jokes that weren't just about wieners—that it made me think that, just maybe, I too could one day write something that would make someone halfway across the world (whom wasn't directly related to me) laugh out loud. You can't put a price on that sort of self-actualization.
In addition to jokes the game has important information to impart too, such as this mnemonic for figuring out whether someone is having a stroke. Unfortunately I had a stroke while trying to follow it.
Rating: 4 out of 5.