‘Thank Goodness You’re Here!’ Review

Developer: Coal Supper | Platform: PS5 | Playtime: 2:05 | Platinum: 3:30

In this golden age of Indie, it makes me happy that people from different nations outside of the major western countries (or Japan) can get games from their hearts and culture – Tchia for example, celebrates New Caledonia, Tales of Kenzaru deals with grief through the lens of African mythology. Thank Goodness You’re Here is like that, but in a small village in Northern (More middle but whatever) England.

You play as an unnamed man with a lemon like head who is sent to Barnmouth to speak to the mayor on something business related. As the mayor is busy, you go off wandering and so begins your journey into helping the town with their ridiculous problems. If the visual style wasn’t a big enough giveaway, the game doesn’t take itself too seriously, with every word that comes out of the characters mouths dripping with britishisms and accent. As a poor white guy in Northern England, I finally felt represented. The script is top notch as you can imagine, getting more than a few laughs out of me. My personal favourite was a flashback of kids teasing another with a big head with the rhyme of “Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, Roger has a big head and he’s a bellend”.

Less stellar than the script and voice acting is the gameplay. It’s not bad on it’s own - in typical fashion, you’ll have to fetch items and talk to people to solve the problems. There’s multiple story branches at any given point meaning you can be solving multiple things at the same time which is cool. Another cool element of the game is that when you enter or leave a building/progress a plot, the characters will move and the environment will change. This is the problem. There’s no map in the game and while the world isn’t big by any means, there’s usually only one specific way to get from place to place. Later on you’ll find yourself darting from area to area and it’s easy to forget which arbitrary pathway leads to where you want to go at any given time. This is something where I think you’ll mileage may vary.

I feel like this is a game that will absolutely live or die based on your understanding and appreciation of dry English humour and the ridicule of it. Personally I think it was hilarious and carried me past any issues with the game I had. I imagine anyone outside of the UK may have a harder time appreciating what’s here.