#a good supper

[morbidmist]

The give this little guy a break update, please

[mikurulucky]

A couple cute ladies and a lil guy uwu

[seraphim-eternal]

My soul is sorrowful, even unto death.

Matthew 26:38

[pickled-flowers]

Fat bear week anyone?

[queerprayers]

i want to say first of all that i fully respect a community's/denomination's/culture's right to have closed practices. i am not entitled to other people's traditions, and when i am a guest in a space i understand that everything is not automatically for me. and i know i do not have to understand to respect.

and also! when i go to a catholic church and can't receive communion i want to fall on the floor weeping. what do you mean i can't have him he's right there. sorry my baptism was the wrong kind of baptism. i'm hungry and you want me to become someone else before being fed.

[redheadedbrunette]

"Mass is in the evening tonight, right?" Yeah, buddy, we're commemorating The Last Supper not The Last Brunch

[hasaniwalker]

Thank goodness you're here.

Been a bit sick. So I made a little helpful lad.

[ducktracy]

at this point, combing through boards to post and going “oh i forgot i referenced that” is also a part of my boarding process

[jaggedjot]

Underlining the question of 'whose decision was it to have The Kiss of Judas overlooking their marital bed?' with thick red marker.

[peaceblank]

[saintsenara]

Ur comment about Tom watching Antiques Roadshow with fish and chips has got me wondering about what you think the HP characters go to chipper orders are? I’d wager Dumbledore would enjoy a spicebag myself..

i'm genuinely screaming.

dumbledore is one hundo after a spice bag, as are ron and tonks. they are the three people who have made the correct choice.

as for the others...

harry [dursleys] and tom [orphanage] are obviously choosing the plainest option - cod and chips. tom would go in for mushy peas and a packet of benson and hedges alongside his. harry - given his canonical sweet tooth - is getting some sort of deep-fried chocolate bar as a chaser.

hermione [pretentious] is having the thinking woman's fish order - plaice and chips. unless she's been drinking, when she - like ginny - loves a battered sausage for the innuendo potential.

arthur's having scampi, because that seems the most muggle, and a selection of every sauce in the place. molly's having haddock, which she considers respectable, and is being joined in that choice by mcgonagall.

sirius [depressed] is taking the risk on a chipper pie - a gristly steak-and-kidney that's been sitting under a heat lamp all evening, for example. he prefers the rats he ate while living in that cave.

lupin [there] is having plain chips, no sauce or anything.

snape [ill-tempered] is going for one of northern ireland's greatest chip shop creations - a pastie supper. which can - like him, to be quite honest - best be described as a lump of mystery meat.

neville [northern] is obviously having chips and gravy, in fear that his gran would disown him otherwise.

luna [disconnected from reality] is going for the other one of northern ireland's greatest chip shop creations - a cowboy [pronounced coyboy] supper.

any malfoy [posh] is leaving the function and never speaking to you again if you suggest going to the chipper [good]. but narcissa secretly loves a curry butty.

bellatrix [unhinged] is indulging in a habit i didn't realise was unusual until i went to uni in england, and slapping tinned pineapple and thousand-island dressing on top of a portion of chips and calling it "hawaiian".

[speed-demon-doodler]

Me, my partner and our newly adopted son that we found scuttling under a pot (he kept asking for some peans? not quite peas, not quite beans? but something special in betweens?)

----

I get it if you don't trust my shitty fanart but please take this as a sign from the gods and go play it ! we had a delightful weekend with this absurd gem of a game, 100% would recommend

[kitsunigami]

vampire manga boy icons

[weepingmilkshakedreamer]

i g0t int0 a game called "thank goodness you're here!" recently z0 uhh yeah have thiz lil d00dle i did. l0l

and well all i g0tta zay b0ut it iz that the tiny salezman y0u play az iz such a zilly lil guy and i l0ve em sm [like br0 became an0ther c0mf0rt character 0f mine]. l0l

[everygame]

Thank Goodness You’re Here!

Developed/Published by: Coal Supper / Panic Released: 1/08/2024 Completed: 7/08/2024 Completion: Finished it!

It seems contrarian for me to open this by saying this is definitely the best game of 2024 and it’s definitely going to be my favourite game of the year… but it’s true.

The thing, I suppose, that makes that kind of wild, declarative statement seem so difficult to declare is that… games are just so broad, aren’t they? Playing something like Thank Goodness You’re Here! is so unbelievably different from playing, say, my favourite game of last year, Hi-Fi Rush, that it doesn’t feel as easy to say as declaring one movie “the best film of the year.” I mean in that case, you still just sit there and watch a movie. There’s not quite the same… granularity of experience. I mean even if you were talking indie games, Balatro touches such a different part of my brain from Thank Goodness You’re Here! So how could I ever, really, compare them?

Well, you know what? Sometimes you gotta just stick your flag somewhere, and my flag goes in the top of a Yorkshire pudding, and when it unfurls it’s the flag… of Yorkshire. Which surprised me, because I’m Scottish, so normally it goes in the top of a Scotch pie, and it’s a Saltire, so I guess I really like Thank Goodness You’re Here!

To describe it, though, which is what you’ve paid for, Thank Goodness You’re Here is a non-evil Untitled Goose Game. You play, in some respects similarly, an agent of chaos in a small town: a tiny man with… jaundice(?) who has been sent to the town of Barnsworth to help the mayor, but end up in the tangle of everyone’s lives. You help them do things that sound explicitly rather simple like mowing a lawn to buying some soup… but it’s not simple at all.

Unlike Untitled Goose Game, your tiny man isn’t just a wee dick; you’re actually helping people, it just happens to be in a very anarchic fashion. You rise to the level of the town, rather than lowering it, so outside of a few smacky bum-bums, you never feel like you’re bullying anyone… well maybe that guy with the chimney. But the joke works.

It would be regressive to describe this game as “weird” or “crazy.” What it is, and what makes it so brilliant, is that it’s so British. If you love the era of British comedy that brought us things like Look Around You or Alan Partridge, you’ll feel right at home here, and I was genuinely laughing all the way through this. Mileage may vary: some jokes and sequences are unbelievably puerile, some are a little smutty; some are… disturbing, but there’s a joyful nature to this whole thing, and it’s all so rapid fire that if something falls flat, it’s not long before you’re laughing about something else.

I think also that the game has a near-perfect take on interactivity for this kind of story-based experience. Outside of special sequences basically all you can do is slap things or jump, but everything is reactive, and the level design is cleverly focused; your path through the game is a sequence of designed loops that you can’t deviate from, but as a result you don’t suffer from the kind of downtime you can struggle with in more open adventures and which can ruin immersion. 

Here you’ll never return to an area and discover it static, how you left it, and have to waffle around trying to find X or Y; you’re always moving forward onto Z. I can hear the criticisms, but at least for me this never felt restrictive; the only issue I really had was feeling that I had to put the game down regularly lest I finish it too quickly–though it’s surprisingly lengthy for something featuring so much bespoke art and sequences, at almost five hours.

To be honest, the game manages something that I wish designers of interactive experiences–think your Meow Wolfs, your Sleep No Mores–would learn from, which is how to always be guiding your player forward through a space and yet still allow them to experience it at their own pace. Sure, it has the benefit of being able to lock doors behind you, and there aren’t 300 other tiny men with jaundice trying to do everything in it at the same time (though I’d love to see that?) but I couldn’t help but be impressed with the flow.

(This may relate to me seeing Sleep No More before it closes just before playing this, finding it a hard to navigate mess of meaningless rooms in a warehouse and thinking it was fucking rubbish.)

The reason, really, that this is my game of the year already is that it’s trying to do something specific and it’s doing it as unbelievably fucking well as anyone probably could. Your dexterity won’t be challenged, your brain won’t be taxed, but they don’t need to be. Sure it’s a funhouse mirror, but if someone was to ask me “What’s the UK like?” from now on, I’ll probably just say “Play Thank Goodness You’re Here!”

Will I ever play it again? Absolutely. Not for a long time, I think, but I didn’t technically see “everything” according to the achievements, and I’d like to.

Final Thought: For categorisation sake, I would like to mention that I do think that Thank Goodness You’re Here! is largely specifically English, and Northern English at that, but there are enough commonalities and it features a big role for Davey Swatpaz that I think it’s fair to think of it as extremely British anyway. And speaking of the excellent casting, Matt Berry is in this and as always he’s brilliant. There are few games where I’d say “I really hope you run out and buy this” but there are few things that are such polished diamonds, and even though this was funded by Panic, who apparently have enough money that they can piss it up on a wall on the world’s most niche handheld (hey, I still bought it) smaller games are having such a rough time of it that when they’re good we should really, you know, reward that. Don’t just do it for me; do it for Tiny Tom. Or Big Ron.*

*pie size preference depending.

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