I would never accuse the Yorkshire accent of being beautiful, but the whirlwind tour of the fictional North England town of Barnsworth in Thank Goodness You’re Here! left me marveling. Not only was the game clearly a love letter to the region that inspired it, but a tribute to all the hyperlocal warts that tend to grow on us as the years go by.

None of this charm is delivered with sentimentality or a straightforward narrative, instead opting for a densely-packed comedy of chaos from a brilliant collaboration between James Carbutt and Will Todd known as Coal Supper. You are a little salesman tasked with bringing new business to the town of Barnsworth, introduced via TV ads hawking butter nubs, little pies, big pies, and peans (not quite peas, not quite beans).

From the player’s first daring, death-defying escape from a completely nonthreatening situation (a trend in Thank Goodness You’re Here!), your little salesman finds himself in the North English town surrounded by people with problems. Those problems range from the legible — Matt Berry (in his first credited voice role for games) plays a gardener in need of more water — to the completely bizarre.

The stranger set pieces will have you navigating sentient piles of meat in order to make Big Ron’s Big Pies offering more palatable or removing obstacles all over town so a sick person’s Reed Richards arm can go grocery shopping. I’ve said “little salesman” a few times and I mean it quite literally. He is a very small, yellow man whose smallness serves the game’s problem solving very deliberately. Thank Goodness You’re Here! has the trappings of a classic point and click adventure game from the early 1990s — meet colorful locales and solve their problems. Mercifully, no inventory system exists to muck up the solutions.

In fact, your little salesman has only two abilities at his disposal: jumping and smacking. Jumping will have you climbing, shoving trash down a gutter, and leaping out of windows. Smacking is…everything else. Every hand-drawn piece of art in this game looks like a million tins of fish. Everything sways to the catchy, jaunty-yet-glass-half-empty soundtrack. And yet, your instinct will be to smack everything you see. The game wants you to do this.

It’s how you’ll start conversations with townsfolk begging to tell you their problems with the most exaggerated Yorkshire accents this side of Louis Tomlinson. It’s how you’ll uncover secrets like the town’s singing rat “problem.” It’s how you’ll find the wrench in the fishmonger’s so the local handyman can fix the chippy’s fryer. Almost every single item in the game’s many colorful tableaus can be smacked and changed by the player.

From the jump, Thank Goodness You’re Here! teaches you to be on the lookout for clever (or often absurd) paths to achieve the town’s many goals. Rarely are these difficult to identify or unravel, though I had two moments where I had to backtrack and talk to several characters before realizing the next step was somewhere else. There is no world map or mission log and I didn’t miss them and I doubt you will either. Every screen is connected by a language you’ll learn quickly and even when I was lost the colorful citizens of Barnsworth were quick to set me straight.

The memorable characters and quests you’ll meet are integral to the gameplay, but I’m really impressed by the comedy structure Coal Supper has built. Wearing its obvious (and not-so-obvious) influences on its sleeve, Thank Goodness You’re Here! is densely packed with moments that made me grin and moments that made me belly laugh. A true punchline is not an easy thing to land in the real world let alone a video game, but Coal Supper lands at a staggering rate. Its humor is couched in the world it has built, miraculously unburdened by meta in-jokes or memes used to pad the density of lesser comedic games.

Perhaps the highest compliment I can give Thank Goodness You’re Here! is it confidently enters and exits with perfect timing. The moment I thought to myself “I might put this down for the night and come back to it tomorrow,” having understood the gist and experienced what felt like the bulk of surprises that were in store, the musical finale began and the credits rolled. It is the Platonic ideal of pacing in 2024. As a bonus, I played 85% of the game on Steam Deck (it’s Verified) and it was a knockout work commute or plane ride experience. Just make sure you’re wearing headphones to hear all of the delightful voicework.

When a small team can pack so much real world experience and bone-deep understanding into such a bright, funny, and confident package, not only do I want to see what else that team wants to make, I yearn for a future where more publishers take chances on projects exactly like this. Even if that doesn’t happen, at least I can look at this game and say thank goodness you’re here.