Thank Goodness You’re Here! is a playable sketch show set in an English town

It’s hard to imagine otherwise, but Coal Supper’s Thank Goodness You’re Here! wasn’t always set in Northern England. Schoolfriends-turned-indie-devs Will Todd and James Carbutt said that when they began planning a follow-up to their 2019 psychedelic trip The Good Time Garden, they aimed to apply their gross/cute style and madcap humor to Americana.

But in the process of fleshing out their next game—trading dialogue back and forth in silly voices—they found that each new character sounded exactly like a resident of their hometown, Barnsley. They chose to embrace their South Yorkshire roots.

The result? Barnsworth. The comedy setting offers an absurdist romp through the not-too-distant past, in a town too often overshadowed by bigger neighbors like Leeds and Sheffield.

You play as a traveling salesman from the capital, a silent protagonist who can slap and jump but won’t say “owt,” which I suspect is a nod to London’s reputation as a city of moody misanthropes. As Thank Goodness You’re Here!’s name (and catchphrase) suggests, Barnsworth’s larger-than-life locals are very pleased you’re in town—and even more pleased that you're so easily roped into their peculiar odd jobs.

Coal Supper prioritizes silly goofs above all else. “The things we get excited about are the stupid ideas rather than the game design challenges," says Carbutt. The pair operate on a sketch-first basis, writing scenarios for players to inhabit before building art and gameplay around their absurdist fantasies. Whether you’re swimming through lager-drenched beer pipes before plopping into a waiting pint glass, or sliding a giant knob of butter across town to grease a resident’s trapped arm to freedom, there’s really nothing else like it.

That’s by design, according to Todd. While Night in the Woods’s exploration and Sludge Life’s vibes were inspirations for realizing Barnsworth’s vibrant sense of place and character, the pair consciously tried to make something new with Thank Goodness You're Here! Neat comparisons strike Todd as farcical. “We were trying to shake off the orthodoxy of how a game looks and feels," says Todd.

Carbutt’s art is key to Thank Goodness You're Here!, creating a world that seems pulled from the pages of his favorite kid’s comics like The Beano (or Viz, a more adult-targeted publication). Barnsworth’s characters are all knobbly knees, balloon-shaped heads, and bulbous noses. The town itself is decorated with tins of eel stock, sly posters, and squiggly hand-drawn witticisms all over its storefront signage.

An unexpected influence is smutty postcard art (as sold across countless British seaside towns) and their love for double entendre. The town’s gardener admiring his marrow (zucchini for North American readers) in scandalous, eyebrow-wagging fashion feels straight out of the British Carry On films, as he utters phrases to even make Austin Powers blush.

Comic encounters

Timing, not saucy puns, is what matters most in comedy. When games hand agency—and thus their timing—over to players, that can present a problem.

Todd explains that Thank Goodness You're Here!'s identity as a “comedy slapformer” helped dodge the issue. Interactivity honed down into a small number of verbs encourages players to hunt for punchlines with them, playing the straight man jumping and slapping in and out of trouble.

“In a more traditional game with deeper mechanics, more involved puzzles, the focus then necessarily has to be on the player doing those challenges, which can take away from the comedy,” Todd explains. “If you make comedy the thing of the game, then players lean into that.”

In my time with Thank Goodness You're Here!, I definitely saw the wisdom in letting players uncover their own slapstick delights, triggering countless payoffs with a hefty slap. (One favorite to keep an eye out for: slapping a teenager’s Walkman off and on.)

Originally, Barnsworth was more open-world, threading numerous routes from hubs to larger zones, the game looping across several days. It was too open. Players missed Coal Supper’s carefully laid breadcrumb trail of jokes and got lost in Barnsworth’s outskirts prematurely. A new focused structure—more guided, more curated—keeps players in on the joke.
 

Location, location, location

You can’t beat the deep location research locals gain by growing up in a place. “Because we made it so heavily influenced by our hometown, anytime we needed to design a space or a person we already had in our heads what that would look like,” says Todd. Reality just needed some exaggeration.

Carbutt is particularly pleased with their parodic take on the British discount store. Barnsworth’s version, Price S******s (and its tagline “Low on quality, high on price!”), hits the mark on countless stores crowding every high street, promising cheap-as-chips goods and nonexistent customer service.

These local references risk perplexing international audiences, but Carbutt and Todd’s experience reassures them that players anywhere can see Barnsworth’s unique, charming, and at times somewhat grotesque novelties. If Wallace & Gromit brought Lancashire to the masses, Thank Goodness You're Here! can do likewise for their neck of the woods.

“It seems to be the further you get away from a Greggs [a beloved British bakery chain, particularly up north], the less and less it translates. “ Carbutt jokes. “Maybe in Australia, I don't know if they’d even see it as a comedy. But the closer you get to Banter Town Hall, the funnier it is.”

Coal Supper’s banter test is making each other laugh. Carbutt sees the risk with this method, saying “We've known each other so long, we don't have a separate personality," before comparing their process to The Car Built for Homer in The Simpsons—an over-designed disaster sporting bubble domes and child muzzles. But unlike Homer, indulging their very particular tastes has worked for Coal Supper so far.
 

What We Do In the Recording Booth

When Todd and Carbutt signed with Panic, their new publisher asked if they had any special requests. Off the cuff, they said Matt Berry—the British comedy icon known for his salacious performances in What We Do in the Shadows, Toast of London, The IT Crowd, and Brass Eye.

Coal Supper didn’t expect a big-name comedian known for working with the likes of Taika Waititi, Jemaine Clement, and Chris Morris to join the voice cast for their first commercial release, but sometime later, they were amazed to discover the actor was ready for a debut games role. The problem? He could only record next Monday.

After several feverish days rewriting and expanding dialogue to create a substantial role for the celebrity—they’d hoped, but hadn’t planned—the pair found themselves guiding Berry through the finer points of the Barnsley accent in his new role as the town’s frustrated gardener.

“You had a really good rhythm on it,” Todd says to Carbutt. “You were doing an impression of Matt Berry doing a Yorkshire accent for him to say the lines back. But he nailed it, pitch-perfect every time.”

Except one line. If the Inuit people have 50 words for snow, the English have 50 ways to say “alright." It can serve as greeting or agreement, despairing sigh or resentful curse. Berry, surprising the pair with a surprisingly good impromptu Yorkshire accent despite being from the British Midlands, couldn’t quite get the “igh” in Barnsley’s version.
“It's a very nuanced diphthong,” Carbutt explains, with the aid of his impression of Matt Berry’s booming vocals. “He was doing ‘All-ee-reyt!’ or ‘all-ri-ee-ite!’”

Despite characteristically vigorous efforts, Berry’s acrobatic delivery couldn’t quite produce the right sound. Those lines had to go. “It's so specific to South Yorkshire that I just don't think it came through,” says Carbutt.

It wasn’t just Berry. The whole voice cast—even the Yorkshire-based—were victims of the duo’s self-professed “tyrannical” approach to hit that Barnsley-specific character.
“It felt important to represent the particular things that were culturally Northern English, and the dialects,” Todd says, confident their faithfulness to the region paid off. “We've already got a few comments saying ‘Wow, I never thought I’d hear the word ‘sen’ [meaning 'self'] in a game. It inherits a lot from Old English or Middle English. ‘Thee’ and ‘tha’ sounds almost Shakespearean, but people still talk like that!”

With custom subs to help newcomers learn their “thee”s from their “tha”s, Thank Goodness You're Here! guarantees more people will get to know Barnsley’s distinctive dialect very soon.

Thank Goodness You’re Here! is available now on the Epic Games Store. There’s nowt else like it, as they might say in Barnsworth!