Thank God! review: it's brilliantly paced and won't take you long to finish

British comedy is often defined by its relationship to America: either as the irony and sarcasm that only Americans are said to not understand, or as a vibrant idea factory for works like The Office that Americans can support by remaking them on a large scale.

But peel back the curtains of American cultural hegemony and you find the real pulsating essence of British comedy: innuendo. No American network is in a bidding war to import Vic and Bob or remake Bottom, and Carry On and Benny Hill are assumed to be anachronisms in our modern times, but Thank Godness You're Here! enters the conversation with a nudge and a wink. It's a cheeky two-three-hour adventure set in a small northern town, and it's here to educate the world about our country's obsession with sausages and bare bottoms.

You play as an unnamed businessman, sent to meet with the mayor of a town called Barnsworth, who “needs what we're selling.” When you arrive, nearly every resident greets you with the same refrain: it's a good thing you're here! You quickly become involved in the locals' problems: a man with his arm stuck in a drain, a local pie maker who's run out of meat, a colony of rats living above the supermarket, and much more.

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Helping out means wandering around Barnsworth's colorfully painted squares, markets, alleys, and shops, and slapping at everything and everyone. There are jokes everywhere, delivered by every character, and scribbled across every inch of the landscape. Even if it didn't make me laugh out loud, it was a comedy universe I enjoyed spending time in.

Nothing ruins a joke like explaining it, but as a reviewer I feel compelled to give you a preliminary lollipop lick, so here are two. One of the shops in the first area you visit is called Nick's Brick's and it's closed, with a steel shutter down to protect the front of the store. When Nick opens the shutters he reveals that the shop is just a brick wall.

In the movie Thank Godness You're Here, a man holds a small yellow creature on the end of a plunger and stares at it with squinting eyes.

Image credit: Coal Dinner/Rock Paper Gun

There's a poster in the supermarket that says “Porky Nobbers: That Wet Crunch!” If you're not someone who enjoys the mental sensation of a phrase like “Porky Nobbers,” then perhaps this isn't the game for you. (“Porky Nobbers: Extra Large” is written on another package nearby.)

Your indiscriminate slaps will eventually trigger the next scene or set piece, and the story will move forward. Sometimes this will lead to scenes where you have to use your only verb available, jumping, to climb an area, but it would be a stretch to call TGYH a platformer. “Puzzle game” is a stretch too. This is almost pure narrative, the pleasures of which are found in its writing and animation.

The final ingredient is surrealism, which comes in part from your character's seemingly flexible size. Under normal circumstances, your silent hero is knee-high, but that doesn't stop him from pouring from a beer tap or visiting a microscopic flesh world. Also, animals can talk, and a few characters have supernatural physical attributes. None of this is ever explained – thank goodness.

In the movie Thank Godness You're Here, a cow hangs out in a hot tub with two guys.

Image credit: Coal Dinner/Rock Paper Gun

A supermarket, including one of the Lotto booths from the movie Thank God You're Here.

Image credit: Coal Dinner/Rock Paper Gun

Nick's Bricks store, which is just a brick wall in Thank Godness You're Here.

Image credit: Coal Dinner

In Thank Godness You're Here, a nervous child mops the shop floor.

Image credit: Coal Dinner

All of which has led me to think a lot about Sarah And Duck, a CBeebies animated series with a northern cast of vegetable enthusiasts and dream-logic storytelling. TGYH isn’t for kids – maybe, probably – but the beauty of the implications is that most of the crude stuff in it will be easy for them to ignore. More importantly for us adults, its childlike surrealism puts it more in line with, say, Thank Godness You’re Here!, Local Hero, but with winks.

A child in a parka looks tired at the river's edge, and a little yellow man steps out from the bushes in Thank Godness You're Here.

Image credit: Coal Dinner/Rock Paper Gun

Sometimes I felt a kind of restlessness, an urgent need to make my way to the next joke or new area. Not knowing how to get to the next moment of novelty in this kind of game feels like death to me, like reading a book and seeing the remaining pages pasted in. But that only happened once in TGYH! and only briefly. Overall, even as someone who generally has trouble with visual novels and the like, the story here was adequate. The short stories overlap, the characters return again and again, and eventually build to a magnificent climax.

By the end, I was convinced that Thank Godness You're Here! deserved its place in the canon of British comedy, particularly those that celebrate the peasantry of our better selves, from Wodehouse to Wallace & Gromit to the Cornetto trilogy. And I haven't even mentioned that Matt Berry does the voice-over. Send it to an American in your life and show them that there's more to our list of cultural exports than irony and failed politicians.

This review is based on the game review structure provided by the developer.

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