The Holy Gosh Darn review

• Reviews by Sam Amiotte-Beaulieu
• Published:

A funny, frequently divine time-travel adventure of biblical proportions with a surprising amount of heart

When I first booted up The Holy Gosh Darn, I jumped in expecting a silly adventure poking fun at religious tropes while I ran around as a sassy angel solving puzzles. I knew you talked to a literal butt-faced demon and that the game involved time travel, but I had little else to go on. What I did not expect to find was a game that gave me as many “aha!” moments as belly laughs, and by the time the credits rolled I was genuinely bummed that my time with the characters in this charming world had come to a close. 

The Holy Gosh Darn is a side-scrolling adventure game that takes place in the same universe as Norwegian developer Perfectly Paranormal’s previous games Manual Samuel and Helheim Hassle. Here you play as the archangel Cassiel of Celerity as she is just trying to have a normal, boring day in Heaven when a sudden influx of three hundred phantom spirits causes Heaven to explode – or at least, it will if you don’t bring out Heaven’s ultimate defense: The Holy Gosh Darn. Unfortunately, as you are learning what this sacred artifact is, you and everything else in Heaven are blown up. 

Rather than ceasing to exist, Cassiel wakes up in a white void where she’s greeted by Azrael of Mortality (aka Death). He explains that in an incident that “might” have had something to do with him, three hundred orphans were suddenly killed when it was not yet their time to die, causing the influx of phantoms that rushed Heaven and created a paradox. Azrael gives you a new bit of “bling” that serves as a time-travel device that can send you forward and back in time, giving you enough time to find and use The Holy Gosh Darn, which will enable him to undo the deaths of the orphans that caused the paradox in the first place. You have only six hours until Heaven is destroyed (Heaven blows up at 6 PM and you slept in until noon; great job starting the day bright and early!), so get out there and save it. 

The Holy Gosh Darn is gorgeous to look at. The game is presented in a 2D animated cartoon style that feels highly reminiscent of something like Gravity Falls or Over the Garden Wall, and every character is immediately recognizable and distinct. Your adventure will require you to traverse a variety of locales. While your journey begins in the angelic realm of Heaven, you will eventually see the likes of demonic Hell, the Norse underworld of Helheim, and the mundane streets of Earth in 2016 (as this game takes place not just in the same world, but on the same day as Manual Samuel). Each location you visit has a distinct visual look, but everything has a wonderful mix of being incredibly over the top while maintaining a sense of mundanity to everyone but the player. To everyone else in these worlds, this is just another day at the office.

While strolling about Heaven, you will see whimsical clouds scattered among white brick apartment buildings gilded by shining gold before coming across the labyrinthine winding back alleys of Mysterious Ways (no really, that is legitimately the name of the area). In Hell, you’ll see unlucky souls falling from the flaming sky as they’re dragged down to their eternal resting place… But then you see that they’re given a free t-shirt and have access to a free board game and coffee café, so maybe this place isn’t so bad after all? Helheim is renovating with a more modern Norse mythological look, and there’s even a comedy club for dragons! Earth is suitably normal-looking, but the main location you visit involves researching unimaginable technologies, such as goggles that allow you to comprehend things that are, well, uncomprehensible. 

Characters from Heaven look suitably angelic, with some taking cues from the eldritch horrors of the biblically accurate angel meme with multiple characters being depicted with extra eyes or more than one set of wings. Other angels appear human, with only a glint of gold or a small halo giving a nod that they are more than they seem. Hell is filled with easygoing demons typically hanging out with unlucky humans wandering around – most of whom with visible indications of what killed them, such as being stuck with a hole through their head or one less limb for all of eternity. Demons come in all shapes and sizes – some twice the size of Cassiel with the face of an animal but the body of a large person, others no bigger than a small bird with a pair of bat wings. Helheim is host to a wide variety of mythological creatures, whether it’s dwarves working at the new smithing shop or a goblin wearing a suit jacket. Every realm you visit is an absolute treat.

As you explore these fantastical worlds, the game constantly plays with the fact that Cassiel is the only character who knows Heaven is going to be wiped out of existence before the end of the day. The music reflects this feeling; you may be running around scrambling to get what you need, but demons will be sipping coffee in the background with a chilled-out guitar groove playing. There is frequent juxtaposition between the urgency of your task and the laid-back nature of everyone else around you, with bright and bubbly music tracks providing wonderful contrast to the knowledge that the end is nigh if you are unsuccessful. 

The Holy Gosh Darn has a pretty simple control scheme. You control Cassiel with either a standard gamepad (with your movement handled via the d-pad or analog stick) or keyboard (with movement handled through standard WASD along with other key mappable inputs). The game takes place on a 2D plane, and you start out with a simple jump mechanic and the option to pick up or interact with objects in the environment. An early example of this is being able to brush your teeth – as far as I can tell there is no gameplay reason for this being there; it’s just a fun thing you can do to elicit some humorous dialogue. The controls work well enough to get around, but I sometimes found myself having issues where I wanted Cassiel to walk up a set of stairs and instead walked past them, or jumped up and fell through the stairs when it looked like I should be able to land on them. It was only an occasional annoyance and typically I was able to get where I was going after a couple tries, but it would have been nice to see clearer pathing denoted in these cases.  

The Holy Gosh Darn

Genre:	Comedy
Presentation:	2D or 2.5D, Side-scroller
Theme:	Religion/Occult, Savior, Time travel
Perspective:	Third-Person
Gameplay:	Puzzle, Quest
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Medium (5-10 hours)
Difficulty:	Low
Graphic Style:	Cartoon

You will gain a small number of additional abilities over of the course of the game that allow you to access new areas, i.e. a double jump and a dash. However, the meat of the experience lies in your trusty time-travel device given to you by Azrael. Certain events and conversations are triggered by a set amount of time passing, and you will need to figure out what things happen at what times to proceed. You are able to move forward and backwards to any 15-minute increment of in-game time, as tracked by the always running in-game clock in the bottom right corner. The clock will note where Cassiel is at each 15-minute interval, and if you go back to one of these moments, you will be returned not only to that time, but to whatever location you were visiting at that point as well. 

If there’s a specific moment you’d rather return to outside of these 15-minute increments, you can manually set a time stamp at any point to return instantly to that exact location and time. You can reset the time stamp, but you can only have one active at any given time. But you’ll have to be careful – if you move further back in time past where your time stamp is set (you can’t move forward in time to a time stamp, only back), it will be erased. Your ability to create a precise time stamp will be invaluable in some trickier sections, where one wrong move can cause you to fail in something needed to progress towards your ultimate goal of saving Heaven. 

Other characters all have their own predetermined lines they will try to say to you each time you meet them. Biblical Eagle Creature (or BEC, as Cassiel calls him) wants to tell you about his day shoveling literal dog feces as soon as you walk outside your apartment – all dogs go to heaven, after all. The first time you speak with him, he’ll talk your ear off and can cause a significant amount of time to be lost if you listen to his entire tirade about how his morning has gone so far. This is where another key feature of The Holy Gosh Darn comes in: your ability to tell anyone to basically shove off. When you are waved down by anyone to start a conversation, if you hit “B” fast enough you will basically tell them you can’t talk right now in a variety of colorful ways. This will typically make characters unhappy with you, and most of those you’ve told off will refuse to talk with or help you after that until you reset to an earlier point of the in-game day. 

You can’t always blow people off, however, as one of the key items you will be collecting in this game is information. You need to talk with people to acquire it, but it’s a balancing act of figuring out who to speak with and at what time to maximize the amount of things you can accomplish before you’re forced to move back to an earlier point in time. The majority of characters with the same lines of dialogue will have to be spoken to multiple times in order to progress, and it can be tough for a time-loop game to keep an audience engaged when the same scenarios are playing out over and over. Here, however, there are many different ways a conversation can play out. While your counterparts will keep trying to say the same things every time, Cassiel can interrupt with the knowledge you have acquired from previous conversations to move things along. The way these conversations organically change as Cassiel learns more information more efficiently leads to a huge variety of ways they can play out.

As you move forward and backwards in time, you will also collect a variety of inventory items needed to save Heaven. One puzzle involves a pair of novelty demon horns required to blend in with the denizens of Hell, while another involves you ordering an alcoholic beverage in order to sabotage a helicopter in Helheim. Puzzles will have clues for how to progress either in the environment or from Azrael (who resides in your time device, providing hints and commentary throughout the game). The problem is, if you collect a pen at 12:30 PM and you travel back to 12:00 PM, you will lose the pen you collected at 12:30 PM. 

Fortunately, the one thing you will not lose as you move through time is knowledge. For example, early on you will be tasked with finding a character’s true name, and he states that he’d never tell you unless he knew he had less than an hour to live. Lucky for you, you know exactly when that will be – and sure enough, an hour before Heaven explodes you have the option to discover this character’s true name. Once you learn it and travel back to the beginning of the day, you will lose all items in your inventory collected up to that point, but you can walk right up to the character and tell him his true name. The game is full of incredibly well-thought-out puzzles like this one, and I was impressed with how intuitive the system is. Eventually you will gain the ability to time warp an item so that it will exist outside the time stream, adding another layer of strategy. This way you can keep an item with you as you move back through time, but you will need to choose wisely which object to time warp to maximize efficiency.

As for the writing, The Holy Gosh Darn is absolutely hilarious. The tone is consistently subversive to the traditionally serious existential nature of an epic involving the afterlife. A running gag consistently plays with the fact that demons in Hell are not allowed to swear while the inhabitants of Heaven are constantly using colorful language. There is one section where previously-angel-turned-demon Gabriel is being chased by a small demon named Sweary screaming “SWORE!” with a coin-filled swear jar. Every character is an absolute joy to interact with. The game also features one of the most original collect-a-thons I have ever encountered. Instead of finding scattered objects, an angel named Elder 7 asks that you find each of his siblings and tell them they suck with zero context. Each time you do, the found sibling lets out the most dejected “Oh…” I have ever heard, and every time it made me burst out laughing. 

One of my favorite sequences has you playing an insanely obtuse board game called Florple. Every time I thought the game was done throwing new rules into the mix, the demonic cat creature running the game akin to a dungeon master would come out of left field with a new rule, such as telling everyone to take out their fly swatters to beat the crap out of one of the players. The game is full of off-the-wall moments like this, and every time it is an absolute treat. 

The dialogue gets an additional boost from the absolutely stellar voice performances from the cast. Every line is delivered with deadly precision to ensure maximum payoff for all of the hilarious punch lines. And yet as funny as it often is, there are moments of surprising character depth that made me feel for the characters in a way I had not expected. There’s a touching scene where Cassiel spills her heart out to her best friend and fellow angel Puriel, explaining how the world is going to keep ending until she is able to fix it and regretting that none of what she’s saying right now will be remembered by Puriel once the time loop resets. In a game where you play an angel interacting with gods and demons in order to save Heaven, this interaction brought a level of humanity to the story that made me love these characters even more than I already did. Every time I reset the time loop, it was another chance to interact with these incredible characters all over again.

Final Verdict

The Holy Gosh Darn genuinely surprised me as much as it entertained me. I knew I was going to laugh with the ludicrous concept of the game, but I never expected to feel a bittersweet melancholy after my time with its incredible cast of characters came to a close. It’s a colorfully gorgeous cartoon adventure with some clever time-bending puzzles, and over its 6-8 hour runtime I forged a genuine connection with this zany universe and its wonderfully voiced inhabitants across the various biblical settings they call home. As with other classics of the genre, this is an experience where the true prize isn’t reaching the end, but instead getting to experience all of the wonderful interactions with the vibrant cast of characters along the way. And this is definitely one unhinged adventure worthy of your time.

Sam played The Holy Gosh Darn on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher.

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