Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Barnsworth does not exist but there is a good chance you know somewhere like it. Landmarks in this fictional Yorkshire town include a chippy called Marge’s Chippo and a discount shop named Price Shaggers. Weeds sprout between pavement cracks; the river is the favoured hang-out for bored youths; rubbish is strewn about the dilapidated high street. Thank Goodness You’re Here! paints a picture of post-industrial decay, yet it is a far cry from the social realism of Ken Loach — more The Beano comic than I, Daniel Blake; less Kes than Rick and Morty.The art style is what hits first: bright illustrations of odd and sometimes grotesque characters. Then the gags arrive, not as a trickle but a deluge, and the pace doesn’t let up until the credits roll. You play as a tiny salesperson, tufts of red hair sprouting out of his head, beckoned to his manager’s office because Barnsworth is in need of what your company is selling. The meeting over, you look for a way out, except you’re only able to move along a 2D plane and the door is located in the background. The solution to the puzzle, it transpires, is to wallop the water cooler until the receptacle comes loose. Water gushes across the office, but you’re able to use the vessel as a step to hop out of the nearby window. Without missing a beat, the manager asks for another water cooler — “It’s happened again,” he sighs.Upon arrival in Barnsworth, the game’s form quickly reveals itself: a series of spaces filled with an outlandish population to talk to and receive quests from, including an innuendo-loving gardener voiced by Matt Berry.The best of these play out as absurdist vignettes, like a bedridden chap who needs help with his groceries. His fleshy pink arm extends out of bed, down the hall, out the front door and across town, wrapping itself around water fountains and winding through sewers. You follow gallantly, squeezing through pipes yourself, all until his shopping arrives home and he can enjoy a soothing bowl of soup — which naturally spills all over him. Another chronicles the meaty hallucinations of the town’s butcher; there is also a Tardis-like wheelie bin, home to an old man and his dim-witted pigeons.But the game isn’t quite so anarchically fun as another small-town sandbox, 2019’s Untitled Goose Game. Rather than honking about as a goose, disrupting the twee, sleepy lives of villagers in south-east England, your primary mode of interaction is the comparably mean-spirited slap (which, in a way, makes Thank Goodness You’re Here! the world’s first happy-slap simulator). It’s fitting: a little too often, the game feels as if it sneers at its northern subjects, treating them as the butt of jokes rather than celebrating their eccentricities.For sure, there are laughs to be had, both of the genuinely witty variety and those of crass, cartoon silliness. But Thank Goodness You’re Here! lacks a certain comedic warmth, like that permeating the work of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, the modern masters of quotidian surrealism. The game lands less like a love letter to a forgotten corner of England than a backhanded compliment.★★★☆☆On Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4/5, from August 1
