Perhaps the best surprise of Gamescom Opening Night Live 2023 was Thank Goodness You're Here!, one of the very last trailers dropped at the very end of the showcase.

This delightful-looking "slapformer" comes from the team at Coal Supper, Will Todd and James Carbutt. Thank Goodness You're Here is a surreal tribute to their home in northern England: Barnsworth. This is the developer's first full-scale console game following the Steam hit The Good Time Garden.

It looks like a live Beano comic, but is full of adult humour and grotesque visuals throughout. Suitably British, then, innit? Let's see what publisher Panic has to say about the game:

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After arriving early for a big meeting with the mayor of a bizarre Northern English town, a traveling salesman takes the time to explore and meet the locals, who are all very eager to give him a series of increasingly odd jobs… Thank Goodness You’re Here! is a comedy slapformer, which unfolds over time as the players' exploration and antics leave their mark on the strange town of Barnsworth. With each completed odd job, new areas of the town open up, stranger and stranger tasks become available, and the clock ticks towards our salesman’s big meeting. The town’s colorful inhabitants are brought to life with vibrant hand-drawn animation, fully voiced dialogue, and wall-to-wall double entendres.

Features:
- Bold, beautiful visual design that seamlessly blends side-scrolling action vignettes with top-down exploration in a chock-a-block open world
- Progressively more involved and puzzling odd-jobs to complete: cut the grass, bake a pie, traverse the astral plane!
- Hand-crafted animation and original story based on traditional Yorkshire folklore
- Authentic regional dialects guaranteed to mek thi spit art thi tea laughin’
- Oddly moving original soundtrack

Thank Goodness You're Here! will be at Gamescom over the next couple of days, but you'll also be able to try the game out at PAX West from 1st to 4th September.

We're excited to dunk our biscuits into our tea when Thank Goodness You're Here! launches on Switch sometime in 2024. Will you be putting the kettle on for a slapformer? Let us know down below.