Earlier this year, I played the Steam Next Fest demo for the new indie game Thank Goodness You’re Here, and it was like a shot of cheeky British comedy adrenaline right into my brain. It was only a twenty minute sampler of the game’s opening, but it had tremendous heart, fun light puzzles with clever solutions, and an intense creative identity that spoke to me even though I’ve never personally been to the UK. I needed more of its weirdness, and I needed it immediately.
Now that I’ve bought and finished the full game — sadly, I think that opening demo chunk is probably the game’s most enjoyable bit of content. The following two hours (it’s not a long experience) are fine, but they meander over similar ground, and late game attempts to inject some real darkness and overt game design commentary made me pine for the goofy beginning. I started the game marveling at its sense of comedic timing, and the way it simplifies every interaction into jumping and slapping, but by the end I just felt sour and sad.
The rest of this piece contains some very mild thematic spoilers for this game so that I can talk about what I think it’s trying to accomplish, but I don’t give up the specifics of how it gets there. It also has one or…
