Reasons to Love: Thank Goodness You're Here!

There's a game with a 90's Flash cartoon style, with a gameplay that harkens back to the old-school point-and-click adventure games. Except you never use the mouse. You just wander around, jump, or smack things. Very occasionally, push things. Meanwhile, you get a glimpse of the lives and dramas of Barnsworth, a sleepy little mining town going nowhere fast.

Or, as I told Chaos when she wanted to play it: It's a beautiful day in Barnsworth and you are a terrible, tiny salesman.

It's a game I'd recommend to my Mum, even with the pitch-black comedy moments. I think the cartoony aesthetic blunts some of the truly horrible bits.

You play as the typical Silent Protagonist, and can only interact with anyone or anything by smacking them. Plus, everywhere you go, you cause chaos to solve other people's problems. This is, nevertheless, viewed as a positive outcome.

...despite one moment where you unleash boiling oil on the townsfolk...

There's visual puns everywhere, strangeness all over the place, and you can technically win the game by doing nothing for fifteen minutes. If you can stand doing that, of course.

It's ridiculous, it's fun, and there's more than one moment where you feel sorry for the people you're harassing as part of the story progression.

For those scared of computers, it is ludicrously easy to get the hang of. For those with hearing difficulties, it comes with subtitles - though they're translated here and there from the dialect in Barnsworth. And for those with filthy minds, there's innuendo all over the place.

And you can play it through in about ten minutes.

Now the caveats: It costs about $30Aus and has a quicktime event as part of the closing sequence. There's no true ending, either. Just a long sequence of people relying on your character to do bizarre stuff to help them out.

I've played it through twice and I'm going to play it again to get all the achievements.