Thank Goodness You're Here! review

• Reviews by Shawn Mills
• Published:

You’ll surely be grateful for this short but hilarious cartoon adventure that delivers a thigh-slapping good time

Thank Goodness You’re Here! is hard to describe. It is unmistakably a cartoon comedy, but there is no central narrative or mystery pushing things forward. It also avoids the usual trappings of a puzzle-driven point-and-click, instead unfolding through a loosely connected run of situations that keep the pace brisk and the gags coming. So, it’s not an adventure game, yet it also is. But one thing is crystal clear from the moment you step into the northern English town of Barnsworth: everything exists in service of one goal – to make you laugh. The game never explains itself or breaks character to make sure a joke has landed. It trusts you to keep up, and if you haven’t, don’t worry, there’s another joke coming right along!

The opening scenes showcase the town and its local residents, while also demonstrating straight away what level of humour is to be expected. A series of TV commercials of local businesses such as Tiny Tom’s Tiny Pies, Peans (“not quite peas, not quite beans”), and Big Ron’s Big Pies are played for you by your boss before the entire plot is laid by explaining that this is Barnsworth, where they want what you’re selling. There’s no detail even about what your company sells; this introduction is all about getting you out the door and into the action.

Our protagonist, an unnamed yellow-skinned salesman with tufts of ginger hair, arrives early for his meeting with the mayor but the mayor is busy, so with time to kill, you’ll instead wander into town and start talking with the locals. I should also mention that you’re REALLY short; so small that you can get washed down a pub’s sink. (And yes, that does happen.) Not that anyone really notices or comments on your stature, but it does get used as a narrative device during your adventures.

Being set in a Northern English town in the 1980s should give you some idea of the style of humour. Think comedy like Monty Python or Fawlty Towers that leans heavily on absurd escalation, awkwardness, slapstick, and wordplay. It’s a layering of multiple jokes into each single scene with exceptional comedic timing that the developers, Coal Supper (a small independent UK studio), really nail.

One of the main ways of getting a laugh is through sight gags and physical comedy, and there are plenty of moments that would do the Marx Brothers proud here. After receiving his mission to visit the mayor, our hero jumps out the ten-story window of his boss’s office. The reason? That’s the only exit you can see. Your boss responds to the situation not by screaming as you might expect, but rather by saying in a slightly perturbed voice, “Good grief lad, the front door is right there!”

The Barnsworth characters are just as funny, like the owner of the pub who early on is trying to work out what to write on the “Today’s Special” chalkboard, only for you to return later to find out his solution was “Drinks.” One scene that made me laugh was the sentient potatoes complaining about how tough life is (they sleep in sacks and have dirt for breakfast), only for their conversation to be cut short by a knife chopping them into chips (or fries for you North Americans).

The main source of humour, however, is found in your engagement with the townsfolk, which can be summed up with the short statement, “Thank goodness you’re here!” It seems like everyone in this village needs your help with their strange and increasingly unhinged problems, and a number of them begin their conversations with that phrase.

A good example comes from one of the early jobs involving a local tradesman, who asks for help with what sounds like a completely routine task. The request is framed as something small and practical so the solution, logically, would be simple and straightforward. However, everything quickly starts to unravel. Interacting with the logical and relevant object causes exaggerated physical reactions, and those reactions begin affecting nearby parts of the environment. And so a seemingly single-person problem starts involving nearby areas and other townsfolk who just happen to be standing nearby.

As the sequence continues, the problem spreads outward. Objects are displaced, characters are knocked about, and the space itself becomes increasingly chaotic. Despite this, the tradesman continues to behave as if everything is proceeding exactly as planned and his dialog is still delivered with the upmost seriousness. By the end, what began as a simple, practical task has expanded into a full slapstick set piece involving multiple characters and environmental changes that persist even after the scene ends. The original request is technically resolved, but only after causing far more disruption than the problem ever justified.

This is where Thank Goodness You’re Here! really delivers. The punchline is not a spoken joke but rather in the characters behaving as if everything that has happened is entirely reasonable. And it’s this structure that the game repeatedly relies on. Small, sensible requests are played absolutely straight by the characters, while we can clearly see that each interaction is pushing the town further into chaos. Much of the amusement comes from that disconnect. Scenes are often allowed to linger just long enough to become uncomfortable before being pushed one step further, while there are other moments where restraint stands out as much as the excess. The balance of these two opposites is another reason the humour lands so well.

If I’m to be objective about the comedy, I will say that it might not be to everyone’s liking. Funny is subjective – some people will simply groan at a man holding the hand of a bed-ridden man with the arm getting longer and longer as he travels over the whole town. I can imagine that some people wouldn’t even like the basic premise of a ridiculously short man engaging in all kinds of shenanigans around town. However, I’m not one of those people. This game made me laugh from start to finish, and some of those little moments have stuck with me in the weeks since I played.

Thank Goodness You're Here!

Genre:	Comedy
Presentation:	Realtime 3D
Perspective:	Third-Person
Graphic Style:	Stylized
Control:	Direct Control
Game Length:	Short (1-5 hours)
Difficulty:	Low
Gameplay:	Exploration, Minigames

Another impressive aspect of the game is its music, which is light, playful, and deliberately understated, the synthesized 80s saxophone standing out in particular. The score’s slightly off-kilter melodies support the comedy rather than competing with it. This is best on display when, during the escalation of a particular visible problem on-screen, it maintains a calm tone before pulling back the volume to almost nothing, allowing the awkward pause and dialogue delivery to reinforce the humour. Voice acting is another major strength; delivery is sharp, confident, and well-timed, giving each character a clear personality. Even minor characters are nicely realised, and dialogue rarely feels wasted or incidental.

The art style is whacky and whimsical in its own right. Each background and character model is drawn with a bold, cartoonish quality. Characters bend, stretch, and flail in exaggerated ways that constantly enhance the jokes. A grocer with a long yellow head looks hilarious as he throws items at a cowering customer, as does the man eating a burger on a park bench with a large, caricatured mouth. Each unique character is vividly drawn, with some having a more realistic (if still cartoony) representation, like Mr Bish from the Cigs 'N' Fishes, and others drawn very comically, such as a customer at Marge’s, a shop whose inventory is kept intentionally vague.

The hand-drawn art style plays a huge role here because even the scenery is designed to elicit a laugh. In one scene, there are random ducks in a park having a conversation about the price of parking. In another, a tree looks decidedly phallic. In the middle of town there’s a pamphlet stand for the B.B.A. a group dedicated to bringing back asbestos, and in another location is a street sign saying “This is a bobby bash area” (“bobby” being slang for a British cop). There is a laugh included in almost every space available.

Background animation is often just as important as what is happening in the foreground. It might be flies buzzing around a bad smell, or liquid draining slowly into the sewer, indicating that something is blocked. The game frequently rewards players who take the time to look around rather than rushing forward, successfully making you feel like you’re moving through a living cartoon.

Barnsworth is made up of a central business district, shops and people everywhere, but it’s a small village so you can quickly visit the outskirts to help a farmer revive his sick cow. You can ascend to higher areas aboveground by walking on the rooftops, and delve below the streets through the town’s drains and water pipes.

What really appealed to me were the exterior town areas that brought to mind what I imagine to be a classic British village: cobblestone roads, short fences around houses, roads with roundabouts and statues in the middle. What makes these scenes more special is the attention to detail: flowers in the roundabout, rubbish on the ground, weeds growing between the cracks of the sidewalk. All these things make the world feel lived-in, like these people resided here before you arrived and will continue to do so when you leave. (If you haven’t completely wrecked the place by then, at least.)

While most of the presentation uses a typical side-on camera angle, occasionally the action turns to a bird's-eye view, while some locations like the inside of shops will be in a close-up, showing the characters much larger than normal. It’s a nice variety that keeps every location interesting and fresh. One of my very few criticisms is that occasionally it is slightly awkward to transition between screens. Resolving it was simply a matter of stepping back a little and then forward again to exit, which didn’t detract much at all from the experience.

Mechanically, Thank Goodness You’re Here! is extremely simple. I played this on the Xbox Series X, but because of the simplicity of the controls, I assume that PC and other consoles would be similarly simple and obvious: the player walks, interacts, and slaps.

Yes, slaps. Slapping is not just a recurring gag but the core interaction here, triggering reactions, advancing scenarios, and uncovering visual jokes. Almost everything can be slapped, and everything you slap will respond in some way, which helps maintain a steady sense of momentum. Want to talk to another character? Slap them! Want to knock something over? Slap it!

There is no inventory system, no hotspot indicator, no quest log, and very little in the way of direct instruction. Traditional puzzles are largely absent. This game is not interested in logic chains or problem-solving in a classic adventure sense. Instead, it focuses on observation, experimentation, and timing, leaning heavily into the click-on-everything trope rather than avoiding it. Trust me when I say that you will get so much enjoyment from watching the reactions to everything you slap.

As a side note, my 13-year-old son walked in while I was playing and we spent about an hour just walking around slapping things in the game. He thought, as did I, that this was hilarious and we loved seeing the different reactions and consequences, whether it’s as simple as a person starting a normal conversation with you instead of responding in anger to your slap, or more visual like a mailbox flying open and mail falling out.

The game will take roughly two to three hours to finish, depending on how thoroughly you explore the town. (I would encourage you to explore everything!) That doesn’t sound like a long time, but the length suits the experience perfectly. The humour stays fresh, and the end comes before the core ideas risk wearing thin. It is the kind of experience that leaves you wishing there was a little more, which is far preferable to overstaying its welcome.

Final Verdict

Thank Goodness You're Here! is a short and quirky comedy adventure that places humour above all else and commits to it with complete confidence. Strong cartoon art direction, expressive animation, excellent voice acting, and a restrained yet also jaunty soundtrack all work together to support the hilarity without overdoing it. It might be brief, and certainly poses very little challenge, but it is tightly paced and knows exactly what it is and never tries – or needs – to be anything else. 

Shawn played his own copy of Thank Goodness You’re Here! on Xbox Series X.