‘Like an unnecessarily horny seaside postcard’: Yorkshire comedy game Thank Goodness You’re Here!
‘Thank goodness you’re here!” says a panic-stricken patron of Rog’s Veg Hall. The shop owner has lost his rag after overhearing a comment about his cornshaped head, leading to a full vegetable assault on any and all customers.
After a careful creep around the aisles and a few jumps through some boxes and bins, I confront Rog with a reflection of what he’s become, triggering a several-minute montage of the man’s tormented life, from childhood bullies to first love to his wife asking for a divorce, unable to live a lie any longer. Rog comically breaks down as the customers escape and I head out to help more citizens.
A bizarre indie platformer about a travelling salesman being given increasingly odd jobs in a Yorkshire village, Thank Goodness You’re Here! is being made by two 28-year-old Barnsley boys. Will Todd and James Carbutt are toiling away at their project in the company of hairdressers, tattoo artists and dozens of startups in a jungle of Portakabins in Hackney, east London.
It’s not too hard to guess at the inspiration for its fictional town of Barnsworth. “That happened naturally,” Carbutt says of the choice to loosely base it on their home town. “We wanted to have lots of characters, and everyone sounded like us… We settled on absurdism and surrealism, but wanted to start somewhere more grounded. It naturally became more Northern and more Yorkshire.”
The game is a “comedy slapformer,” a phrase penned by their publisher, Panic, of Untitled Goose Game fame. But the two think of it as “poking around, meeting the townsfolk and having a good time”. You are essentially solving light puzzles based on precarious situations that you find the town’s residents in, often with hilarious results. The game is filled with more euphemisms than a Carry On film, but it draws more from Wallace and Gromit’s cheeky flavour of humour. “Vic Reeves Big Night Out was a big turning point. We realised that this sort of absurdist comedy resonates,” Todd explains. “It’s mainly driven by our tone of voice, and what we find funny … it’s like one of those unnecessarily horny seaside postcards.”
The zany art style builds on classic British comics and modern cartoons, looking like a mashup of the Beano, Viz and Adventure Time. Everything in the game is designed to make you laugh, be that Big Ron’s Big Pie Shop, the awkward romance between Florence the meat-counter girl and the sweaty delivery boy, or the local food truck merchant who shuts up shop every time you slap his backside, only to come back for more moments later. The humour walks the line between dark, silly and gross.
Before they became game developers, Carbutt was creating ads in Amsterdam for Dutch television and Todd was a developer for a betting firm. Alongside their day jobs, the two best friends worked part-time on The Good Time Garden, a short, surreal experience released on Steam for free in 2019. It received positive feedback, giving them a push towards making a full game. After pitching to more than 80 publishers, and being rejected by Devolver Digital and Squanch Games, US publisher Panic picked their game up.
It’s inevitable that comparisons have been made between Thank Goodness You’re Here! and Untitled Goose Game, the publisher’s breakout comedy hit of 2019. So what do they think about this?
“Will doesn’t like it,” laughs Carbutt. “I don’t like it,” Will confirms.
“No, actually, I think it’s fine. Ob
viously Goose Game is a masterwork at what it is, which is physical comedy. It also created an amazing sense of place, which is incredible, because I don’t think in production any of those developers had even been to the UK. It was all largely recreated from reference images and Google Maps. There’s similar British visual iconography, though Untitled Goose Game is set in a sleepy village in the south east. We’re very much in our post-industrial town in the north”.
It’s the northern townsfolk who make the magic in Barnsworth. “I can’t wait to get home to my puzzles,” announces the local postman, in a voice that could be mistaken for Bob Mortimer. At one point I stumble on a mustachioed gardener fiddling with his hose in a curious manner: “I’ve been sucking this pipe for days,” he shares, trying to fix a blockage.
It’s a long road yet to release, but Carbutt and Todd are grinning through it. “I mean I’m making a game with my best friend,” says James. “What can be better than that?”
• Thank Goodness You’re Here! will be out on PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch and PC in 2024.