Thank Goodness You’re Here!

Platforms: PC, Nintendo Switch, PS5, PS4

Comedy is incredibly difficult to get right in games. What people find funny is subjective to begin with, and then to add a layer of interactivity might mean a joke doesn't land at all. So, when we say that Thank Goodness You're Here! is the funniest game of the year, it's a bold statement.

It's also one we'll immediately caveat with "if you're British", and caveat further with "especially if you're northern". This love letter to Yorkshire from micro-dev Coal Supper positively drowns in references that will blindside the average non-Brit unless they have a Masters in Monty Python Studies. For those that get the jokes though, this evokes the kind of deep, spontaneous, dirty laughs that explode out of you.

Set in the fictional town of Barnsworth, this utterly daft outing casts players as a diminutive junior salesman who, while waiting for a meeting with the mayor, trundles off to meet the town's residents, only to get swept up in helping them solve their outlandish problems. The laughs come thick and fast from the off – you're led to jump out of a window, followed all the way down by panicked screams of "the door was open!" – and don't stop from there.

The whole game feels as if the creators of adult comic Viz took cult favourite Untitled Goose Game, and remade it as extremely… well, northern.

Thank Goodness You're Here! Is a self-described "slapformer" – the only controls are jump and slap, see – but it's really more of a puzzler. These start simply enough, like freeing a fat lad with his arm stuck down a drain by lubing him up with a stick of butter, and get progressively stupider. Soon, you're helping a half-naked self-proclaimed admiral who lives in a dumpster to round up his seagull soldiers, setting up a fish-monger's display by slapping cigarettes into some pilchards' faces, and milking cows into quite the excited state. Some of the bigger puzzles tie up with a Pythonesque animated interstitial, but there's very little separating the game into formal chapters – it's more stream-of-deranged-consciousness, and all the more brilliant for it.

Each barmy problem chains into the next and opens up more areas of Barnsworth, in turn setting up even more running jokes in the background, all of which are extremely British. An escalating dispute between neighbours over bins, a painfully polite man whose living room you'll keep ruining as you dash down his chimney (not a euphemism), mildly threatening teenagers hanging around the town centre, everything costing "ten bob", plenty of blue humour – the whole game feels as if the creators of adult comic Viz took cult favourite Untitled Goose Game, and remade it as extremely… well, northern. That extends right down to authentic dialogue that's, per Coal Supper, "guaranteed to mek thi spit art thi tea laughin’" (and if that made no sense to you, you'll be pleased to know that formal English is an option!)

Ridiculous, surreal, and genuinely hilarious, Thank Goodness You're Here! balances a steady stream of puzzles with a constant barrage of gags that will have you roaring with laughter. There's barely any explaining this game – especially if you're not British, and probably even then, some jokes will fly over the heads of those not from god's own country – but it's charming like little else.