Thank Goodness You're Here!

I came into Barnsworth expecting a light distraction and left with a shortlist of the funniest things I have ever seen in a video game. That is the whole conversation, really, except it would be doing Coal Supper a disservice to leave it there. Thank Goodness You're Here is a hand-drawn "slapformer" built by two people from Yorkshire - programmer Will Todd and artist James Carbutt - who met as kids in Barnsley, and who spent five years making a place that feels like a living memory of a particular kind of Northern English town: the pie shops, the back gardens, the charity cups on the counter, the neighbours arguing over a bin. The fictional Barnsworth is based on that real hometown, and the specificity shows in every corner. The mechanics are almost aggressively minimal. Your unnamed little yellow salesman can walk, jump, and slap. That is the full toolkit. The game switches between a 2D sidescrolling view and a top-down overhead perspective, and occasionally drops you into sequences inside a pub's beer keg or within the mind of a cow - the kind of surreal detour the game treats as routine. You have no inventory, no quest log, no failure state. Each resident of Barnsworth greets you with a mundane request that unravels almost immediately into something spectacular and strange. A bedridden neighbour sends their hand - and then their arm, stretching across the entire town - to do the shopping with you. Characters react to escalating chaos with the polite, slightly put-upon acceptance of someone who has seen it all before. That deadpan delivery is the engine the whole comedy runs on. The voice work earns serious credit here. Matt Berry voices the town's gardener and deploys double entendres with his familiar unhurried gravity. The rest of the cast, drawn largely from the British comedy circuit, land their lines with the timing of people who know exactly when to let a joke breathe. Carbutt's hand-drawn animation is equally precise: over 200 animated elements, from the protagonist to the bin bags, each given a physical expressiveness that sells every gag before a word is spoken. The soundtrack is restrained when it needs to be and jaunty the rest of the time, which is exactly right for this kind of comedy. The honest caveats are worth naming. The game runs two to three hours, and while it knows exactly when it ends, a few reviewers found the final beat slightly abrupt. The comedy is dense with British and specifically Yorkshire references - if you have never heard the word "faff" used in an exit menu before, some jokes will land softer than others. And if you arrived expecting puzzles or mechanical depth, you will find neither. This is closer to an interactive cartoon than a traditional adventure game, and players who need resistance from their games may bounce off the linearity. The loop through Barnsworth repeats its routes, but the town keeps changing state around you - different people out, different doors open - so the repetition rarely feels hollow. What Coal Supper built here is something genuinely rare: a game that cares about craft at the level of the individual joke. Every shop name, every bit of graffiti, every background detail is considered. The whole thing holds together the way a well-edited sketch show does - nothing overstays its welcome, the escalation is calibrated, and the ending, whatever you think of it, arrives on Coal Supper's terms. For a two-person studio's first commercial release, that control is worth admiring as much as the laughs.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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