Thank Goodness You’re Here! review – sheer vivacity and dark charm

PC, PS4/5, Switch; Coal Supper/Panic
In this brilliantly surreal, slapstick cartoon puzzler set in a fictitious northern town, you (a junior salesman) help an array of weird characters with odd jobs

It is a classic British comedy setup. An unknown junior salesman at a large firm is sent on a seemingly mundane trip to an idiosyncratic town – and chaos ensues. Right from the beginning, this wonderful game from tiny studio Coal Supper makes it clear it is going to load this premise with as much slapstick and surrealism as possible. When it’s time to leave the opening sequence, set in a tenth-storey office, the player is forced to do so via the window, their fall broken by the very bus they need to catch for their journey.

When you reach the fictitious Northern English town of Barnsworth, a grim reincarnation of early 1980s Barnsley, you’re supposed to be meeting the mayor but he’s busy, so out on to the streets you go. Here you discover a menagerie of weird characters, drawn in queasily bright colours and a deceptively childlike style, usually greeting you with the words “thank goodness you’re here” before coralling you to help them with a ridiculous crisis. This might be a portly gentlemen who has got his arm stuck in a drain, or a chip shop owner whose fryer is broken, or a senile admiral who needs you to collect his gulls. But wherever you go – through market places, across rooftops, or down ginnels – you will meet more oddballs with odd jobs, as the world’s weird logic and spiralling geography trap you into servile confusion. You wanted to play a cross between a Flann O’Brien novel and an episode of Dick and Dom in da Bungalow? You’ve got it.