As foretold by Geoff Keighley, this year’s Opening Night Live didn't have big reveals in mind and was instead laser-focused on updates for games that we already knew about like Crimson Desert, Black Myth: Wukong, , and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Modern Warfare 3, to 🌳name just a few of the many 💟games that were shown across the two-hour showcase.
Credit where credit is due to Keighley for getting ahead of those expectations, but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t any surprises. Towards the end of the show, the sleep that had gathered in your eyes around the time the ninth HoYoverse game got shown was blasted off your face with a boatload of English charm in the form of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Thank Goodness You’re Here, an indie platformer with whimsy൩ and charm pouring out of its fish-and-chip-eating, flat-cap-wearing, tractor-ಞdriving arse.
I was hooked on Thank Goodness You’re Here followed up a strangely beautiful 🌳shot of its protagonist floating in the sky with scenes of a flasher, a big beefy bum being slapped, a man’s trousers falling down, and some English accents that even I, someone who’s lived in the UK all his life, couldn’t comprehend. I’m probably g𒅌oing to get put on a list somewhere for saying that, but I was sold from day one. I didn’t need to know anything else - you had me at Peans.
After getting the chance to go hands-on with a small section of the game alongside Coal Supper’s two-man team, James Carbutt and Will Todd, I knew more anyway. I didn’t think it was possible, but what I played made me fall even deeper in love with what is now one of my m🐎ost anticipated games of 2024.
The slice of Thank Goodness You’re Here I played had me guiding my little 💟lemon-headed protagonist to a market area of Barnsworth, the fictional north English town where the game is set, to help the owner of a pie shop gather the meat and pastry he needs to make a staple part of every English person’s diet.
Doing that was no Sunday stroll through the market, however. I climbed through pipes and drains, slapped every town member I came across just to see how they’d react, and made sure that all of the fish in one of the market’s ꩵstalls ha🌄d a cigarette slapped in their mouth before they were shipped off to their doom. I’m not even sure what that last one was all about, but it got me where I needed to go and the fish seemed happy enough, so we’ll move past it.
Mechanically, Thank Goodne🌼ss You’re Her♔e is very simple, with most of the problems the game chucked at me being dealt with by either slapping them or jumping on them. Thankfully, mechanical depth clearly isn’t the focus here, as it’s all about the strange people you run into, the always-hilarious things they have to say, and the absurd situations you find yourself in. One puzzle was ‘solved’ by chucking yourself into a pie-baking machine and turning the whole shop into one record-breaking pastry, to the ire of a miniature-pie-making salesman.
With such a big focus on comedy over gameplay, there’s a lot riding on the jokes here. Thankfully what I played was a riot from start to fꦿinish, with some clear inspirations from English staples like Wallace & Gromit. I can’t remember the last time a game made me laug𒀰h as much in its whole runtime as Thank Goodness You’re Here did in just a half-hour play session.
I missed a fair few of the jokes too by leaving a room too quickly or not interacting with people and objects in the town, the devs later told me. Thank Goodness You’re Here’s humour is very in-your-face🏅, but there also seems to be some surprising depth and thought behind the jokes here that I can’t wait to discover. That, and i🥂t features a grit bin, perhaps the most English thing to have ever featured in a video game.
If you’d have told me that, in an event that included , , and , my piꦇck for game of the show at Gamescom would be a daft indie game that starts off with a joke about a product called Peans that’s just mixture of peas and baked beans, I’d have chortled in your face. Now I’m counting down the days until I can get back to Barnsworth, ready to slap all my silly English troubles away.
