The colourful, bizarre and staunchly northern Thank Goodness You’re Here! was a highlight of Gamescom 2023 Opening Night Live.
“Peans. Not quite peas, not quite beans, but something special in between,” unguently intones an announcer who sounds a lot like Matt Berry at the start of the trailer for Thank Goodness You’re Here!, and immediately you know you’re in for something special.
What follows is a cavalcade of bizarre imagery – out-of-control sausage machines, trouser dropping, bum slapping, runaway lawnmowers – all set to a rousing rendition of Lily the Pink. Without doubt, the riotously colourful, wonderfully silly trailer marked the high point of Gamescom 2023 Opening Night Live, Starfield be damned.
Thank Goodness You’re Here! bills itself as a ‘comedy slapformer’ which mixes top-down exploration with side-scrolling vignettes. “After arriving early for a big meeting with the mayor of a bizarre Northern English town,” explains the game’s Steam page, “a traveling salesman takes the time to explore and meet the locals, who are all very eager to give him a series of increasingly odd jobs… ”
These odd jobs veer from the mundane (cut the grass, bake a pie) to the strange (traverse the astral plane), and completing tasks will unlock more areas of the town of Barnsworth to explore. But it’s that utterly gorgeous and vibrant animation that really sets Thank Goodness You’re Here! apart.
Thank Goodness You’re Here! is being published by Panic, who also brought us Untitled Goose Game, and the developers are Coal Supper, the studio behind 2019’s The Good Time Garden, a game about “a throbbing pink world full of strange naked creatures”. It’s coming to PlayStation 5, PC and Nintendo Switch in 2024. Can’t wait.
Read more: Untitled Goose Game review | Honk if you like avian stealth
