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Thank Goodness You’re Here is a vibrant, funny, unashamedly silly game

Thank Goodness You’re Here is a vibrant, silly game based in the fictional northern-England town called Barnsworth, which is definitely 80 percent Barnsley, 20 percent plausible deniability. It's also actually, truly, funny.

Despite having no connection to Barnsworth, our little hero — in varying degrees of tininess — is inadvertently pulled into plumbing tasks, fetch quests and surreal dream-sequence meat-mangling, without ever being asked if he can help. There’s a running joke about wheelie-bins (in the UK, most of our garbage cans are on wheels) that made me laugh on a Sunday evening – the most dour part of my week. But it’s dense with jokes and knowing nods I’m on my second playthrough, taking in all the details, like the horny elderly couple who are never involved with any of your tasks, but always on the sidelines; the cheesy dad-jokery if you linger in a scene and let the characters to talk (“I’m eating for two now… Plus I’m pregnant”); the lightly barbed references to economic decline in the north, and the unashamed exaggeration of northern or working-class stereotypes, many of which will go over American (and south-of-England) players’ heads.

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