Greenalink reviews Thank Goodness You're Here (Mini) #AD

 Developer :Coal Supper
Publisher : Panic
Filesize - 800MB to 1200MB
Price: £16/$17 (prices varies on region)
Website: https://thankgoodness.game

Thank Goodness You're Here (TGYH for short) is a slapping adventure where you play as an unnamed, silent, tiny "Simpson yellow" protagonist, trying to complete his task for the day which is to have an interview with the Mayor of a town, but by the time you get there, that Lord Mayor is currently busy in a meeting and you have to skip a bit of time by doing other things.

When leaving the Mayor's building, you hold the downwards direction on the stick and eventually witness the fictional messy town of Barnsworth.

The game is story driven as solving puzzles unlocks more stores to enter and even browse through other segments of the town. Most of these puzzles are usually either presented as a mini-game such as mowing the lawn or browsing around a specific area to find an important item.

The release date: August 1^st isn't a random day, it shares the same day as Yorkshire Day.
Compare to 1000s of games taking place in America, this one is certainly a rare breed. 

The difficulty of the review for this game in particular is that it's best played by knowing as little as possible so try to avoid watching Youtube videos if you can, otherwise it will ruin the surprise.

So feel free to stop reading this review to avoid possible spoilers or scroll down to the very bottom.

Minor game spoilers below*

After watching the introduction cutscene, you leave your office but not by using the door like everyone else would, oh no sirey, you knock down a giant water bottle and then drag it to the window so that the protagonist can jump out from that window and somehow land on the bus going to Barnsworth with perfect timing. That's how bonkers this game's story is.

One of my favourite highlights is the stories from other NPCs, especially the minor characters where they're not involved in giving the player an task to complete. For example, a toast fan cooks his slice of bread on a BBQ only to find out later on in the game it got badly burnt. The two citizens complaining about a bin in the neighbourhood, eventually as you progress further into the game, they're both inside the same bin playing a game of cards.

Jokes are a big selling point too, it's not the typical 2020s humour where it focuses on dysfunctional influencers, techbro scams, covid, masks, "woke-mind-virus". 
They're mostly classic visual gags with some that will give you a big laugh when witnessing it for the first time, very few of them are visually innuendo heavy that I would be worried if I get flagged for streaming those moments on Twitch for being "too naughty". A funny non-lewd example is the receptionist at the very start of the game sticking some of her physical playing cards in front of a computer screen that is currently playing solitaire. 

When entering a pipe tunnel that is going underground, one of the screens has a building directly above and shows a room that has a plate of the late Princess Diana, it moves very slightly before leaving the screen and after enough visits through this tight tunnel, it will get knocked down to the ground and break.

                  

Visually speaking, it's an impressive game with bright, colourful 2D animation with hardly any skeleton/flash-esque walking cycles with a very few exceptions.

There's a ton of nods to UK culture including "Ding Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead" message on the wall, it's a music track which became very popular the UK music charts after the death of an unpopular politician Margaret Thatcher.

Talk to the hand!

The game features a wide range of characters with different shape and sizes and even facial designs too such as their eyeballs, heck even some animals can talk too.

A lot of objects can be interacted at least once, mostly breaking things or opening up sealed objects such as postboxes and rubbish bags. There's not many useful intereactive items on the map unless it's part of a task to complete.

Performance is butterly smooth running at 60 fps with exceptions to both the cutscenes and the final mini-game as they were running at half the framerate.

Voice acting is another strong point, you do get to hear other UK accents than your typical

1. Posh (Many butlers in video games)
2. Scottish (Xenoblade Chronicles 2)
3. Southern England (Xenoblade Chronicles 1)

One of my favourites is a repairman named Jasper who sounds a lot like Johnny Vegas but stayed in the north a bit too long. Then, there's Matt Berry. Best known to voice George the Volcano in the Volvic mineral water adverts way back in 2007... and many TV shows including the IT Crowd & Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, he voices the gardener who is a bit dimwitted at times, especially when trying to grow a tomato.  My only gripe with the voice acting in general is that the voice direction for both the mole and the worm are very identical whereas nearly all of the humans were pretty much unique, a very minor nitpick.

When booting up the game for the very first time, the game asked me if I understood their dialect or not, I went for the latter and so the English subtitles were straightforward to read it does mean it will be some mismatched words from what you see and what you hear due to dialect differences, that said, I did notice the word "it's" was used incorrectly, but these errors are far too infrequent to ruin the experience.

Editted image showing a text difference example when using either ENGLISH or DIALECT.

Minor game spoilers end here*

It took me roughly 2-3 hours long to beat the game which is isn't long and there isn't any post-game content for extra replayability, no mini-game select, no cutscene viewer other than replaying the entire game to hunt down for missing achievements.
Overall, the quality for TGYH is a fantastic comedy game and very unique, you can see the love Coal Supper has put towards this.

Thank goodness

+ Terrific 2D animation.

+ Authentic English voice acting with Matt Berry as part of the voice cast.

+ A genuinely funny script.

+ Funny mini-games with no game over consequences.

Oh diddly poppycock

- 1 file per account and it autosaves so replaying favourite moments require erasing the current save. An issue for PC Steam but not so much for Switch (& PS5).

- You've seen most of the game after beating it.

- Mole and worm sound too identical.

- Not much interaction variety on objects that are not used to complete a task.

Rating A-

Key provided by Popagenda

#AD is used as poart of the UK's ASA rules.

Greenalink reviews SCHiM #AD

Developer: Ewoud van der Werf and Nils Slijkerman.

Publisher: Extra Nice

Price: Roughly £20.99/$29.99, different platforms and regions may vary on exact price.

Filesize: 700MB - 888.35MB

Website: https://schimgame.com/

Schim is a 3D platformer where you play as some sort of shadow frog known as a schim. 

The simple version is that they are a soul and spirit that exist in everything that casts a shadow from objects to living beings.

The story begins as a youngster going to school, riding his bike home, putting out the fire of someone's BBQ and eventually a montage of the youngster growing up into adulthood right after getting his degree from university, this is where things turn sour for the human as he gets fired from his office job, loses is bike and fails to catch the bus. A series of unfortunate events led him tripping over, tearing the "bond" with the schim. Now the schim's goal is to reunite with the human by going through another 50 something levels.

The main gimmick really is that non-shadow parts of the maps are lethal that you respawn to the nearest checkpoint, so the visuals play a huge role to the level design.

These levels can vary in length, with some taking as short as a minute and some going as long as 10 minutes in a first time playthrough.  My favourite part of the game is when lights come into play for darker/night time levels to reveal more shadows for schim to navigate through to the other side of the map, it's a neat touch and works well with the game's theme.  

A lot of objects are interactable with some being gimmicky such as trash cans spitting out rubbish and then there are the more useful objects such as banners which can fling the schim to the other side. Traffic control does play a huge role in some of the levels, this is to let NPC humans cross the road and let schim use their shadows as they're the only source of "platforms" they can use to cross over.

My least favourite part in the game is trying to hop into NPCs humans/NPCs vehicles (cars/bikes), then holding RT to know where you have to go next and then after letting go RT you find out that your current NPC human/vehicle are going far away from your desired goal as they took a left/right turn a few seconds earlier. 

The themes are pretty varied with museum, beach, zoo, farm, box factory but most of the time it's a busy open town area or a isometric neighbourhood with the layout essentially saying it's a single direction. One cool gimmick is a golf course found in the later half of the game where jumping into the golf ball allows the golfer to strike the ball to send both the ball and schim to another location.

The music done by Moonsailor is mostly relaxing with a tense moment when schim gets separated and in my opinion is one of the game's stronger points.

Most of these levels have collectable items, with some being mandatory to pickup to help complete the level while others are optional as they're treated more like hidden items to increase the playtime, especially for completionists.   Good luck trying to find all items in wide-open maps as one early game level for example where the human is growing up has some collectable items that are pretty well hidden.

After completing the game, you have access to modify the game's mechanics. The default set is the most accessible approach but if you want a more challenging experience you can disable extra jump to make every jump precise, remove checkpoints and enable risky mode to have a limited set of lives. These difficulty modifiers are there for achievement hunters, I cannot confirm if they're available as in-game achievements for Nintendo Switch players.

Overall the game is okay but it was held back by overstaying its welcome by having far too many levels with slower paced development to the human after losing his schim that I felt pretty bored at times, some levels have questionable checkpoints that I had to retry the level and do a slightly different approach to avoid getting stuck.  It does get better near the end both story and level design but it requires going through a good amount of less interesting levels beforehand.

A good schim

+ Neat art direction

+ Relaxing soundtrack
+ Nice interactive features with certain objects.

+ Some cool puzzles too

+ Completionists will find the hidden collectables a bit challenging.

A bad scam

- Questionable level design at times

- Which can lead to some difficulty spikes

- NPC cars going a different direction when you least expect it as you were trying to figure out where to go next by holding RT (there needs to be an option to freeze gameplay time).

- Some levels being recycled for character development story reasons, though those said levels are releatively short.

Rating: B-

Key provided by Pirate PR

Greenalink reviews Turbo Kid #AD

 

Developer: Outerminds Inc.

Publisher: Outerminds Inc

Price: Roughly £16.75/$19.99, different platforms and regions may vary on exact price.

Filesize: 2.18GB

Website: https://outerminds.com/games/turbo-kid/

Turbo Kid the video game was first announced as a Kickstarter project way back in October 2021 with a final build released just over a month ago in April 2024. This game is a 2D pixel platforming adventure (aka Metroidvania) where your character ends up at the Middle-Waste and in order to escape to travel back into the wasteland to become a great hero, The Kid (that's his name) has to collect 4 weapon chips to unlock the giant gate and be free. 

The game takes place as a continuation to a film that is considered to be a cult classic: Turbo Kid released over 9 years ago.

You don't have to watch the film to understand the game as the references from that film are reduced to just quotes from the intro and the short flashback sequences players will get to see after completing certain parts of the game.

Graphics

The level of detail hugely varies, most human NPCs are relatively simple but Turbo Kid stands out as his sprite kit isn't mirrored when facing the other side, just look at his blue turbo glove as an example, this requires producing twice the amount of work to pull this off. The charge effect can also be used to light up dark areas, this effect also happens whenever you get a new weapon chip as a giant beam of light shine down towards the player. 

                 

Boss fights and certain animals have a lot more detail due to bigger sizes and/or using a few more colours.  

                         

The HUD and Menu give out a very pre-2000s digital feel with thick bold text. There is a notebook journal that has a lot of personality thanks to the drawings in each page, this is also a nod to the prequel film where the kid used these drawings mainly for personal guides but also his personal life on other people (and robots) he met along the way including Apple. 

                  

Gameflow

The game is split into 3 acts.

The prologue where you have to collect your main gear that you'll use throughout the game including Turbo Glove's charge upgrade (projectile weapon), Machete (melee weapon) and BMX (the game's main selling point). After that, you have to find 4 weapon chips which have spread out to 4 different regions, then act 3 is the big...or little finale depending on the player's choice right after the end of act 2.

Turbo Kid does a good job showing what the new power-up can do by adding a video clip moments after obtaining a new item, so for weapon chips they show how they're used in utility/puzzle solving and then a clip on how they're used in combat.

Act 2 which covers around 70% of the playthrough feels like the 4 main areas can be done at any order although some stages are best done later. I noticed that each area has their own mobility upgrade which becomes a vital tool to navigate through the rest of the region (a bit like pre-2013 Zeldas where the item in the dungeon becomes the main tool to solve puzzles/boss fights).  I originally did Junkyard first but got stuck so I went to the Lightning Dome instead. I was hooked on trying to get the fastest time which gets all of the prizes for each last survivor challenges despite being underpowered on weaponary, mobility and health. Despite this, I managed to clear for the first trial with the fastest time to earn all 3 prizes.

Having 3-4 HP wasn't really ideal for the tougher trials so I went to the sewers instead, this is where things got challenging with a difficulty spike in one room as it was filled with a lot of flies, toxic soul orbs and dead bodies getting resurrected thanks to those toxic soul orbs, oh there's a toxic water down below with barrels that sink when stood on for too long AND chemical droplets, this sounds very much like a Kaizo Mario romhack but really it's not too bad if you play slowly rather going all guns blazing, after that painful segment you're rewarded a mobility power-up, this one is actually really good, not only it improves Kid's speed when going through crawl spaces and bypassing strong winds that would've pushed him back, it gives him invincibility which does trivialise some of the more challenging enemy encounters, eventually I took on a green slime boss that has 2 phases, with the first being straightforward. Phase 2 on the other hand took 7 minutes longer this was mainly due to 2 factors, their HP was pretty high and the only way to get in a good position and constantly fire is the to use the half pipe and perform BMX stunts for a speed boost, by the end of the battle I get the first weapon chip.

That's just the first main section.

The length of the other sections varies with the Lightning Dome being really short IF you don't die way too many times, Junkyard can be lengthy if you're struggling to find the 4 Jimmy robots and the Skatepark which is just as lengthy as Junkyard gives the BMX a bit more screen time thanks to its sport theme.

Gameplay mechanics

The Kid's main gear for mobility is his BMX which can teleport directly towards the player and ride it immediately thanks to the help from Naomi's teleport gizmo, it's easy to use but tough to master when it comes to slopes and hills, there is a trick system too to give him a speed boost after pulling off a successful stunt. Speaking of mobility, the movement controls were set to left stick by default which seems odd as the aiming was still limited to 8 directions so I swapped left stick with D-pad and it felt better.

While the mobility power-ups are great thanks to their amazing usage, the weapon chips are a little disappointing.

For starters they feel more like tools to be used for solving puzzles/breaking barriers rather than combat as the default ammo count can be very low. The only way to refill turbo energy is to attack the enemies with either turbo blasting, bike ramming or machete slashing. There are turbo energy refill stations but are very rare to encounter and are mostly reserved in places used to solve puzzles. I mean the combat feels Mega Man with a charge shot mechanic but instead of being restricted to two directions, you have eight and you unlock new weapons by defeating bosses, the other weapons should have at least 10-15 shots minimum before having to refill it again. Saying that, the gear you obtain from one area can make things a lot easier to deal with in another area as some puzzles can be skipped thanks to the kid's recent tools.

The Ooze Splitter can generate platforms at certain parts but the max ammo count before getting turbo energy upgrades is a measly 4, which became a bit annoying as I had a bit of difficulty completing a short sidequest to fix the antenna where missing a shot or 2 will require killing animals to refill turbo energy.

The Lightning Gun weapon is a little better, its charged shot spits out an energy ball and can hit any target that's nearby, the rate of fire from the electric sphere is pretty slow though.

The next weapon is Rocket Pistol, now let's be honest, unlike the ooze and lightning chips, this one has no utility for puzzle solving and I only used it at one part of the game that's mandatory to progress further into the adventure by destroying a breakable wall.

Lastly, the Saw Launcher are used to destroy an unique type of barrier but in terms of combat, they can pierce through enemies and ricochet off from walls, hopefully hitting the same enemy the second time, using the entire turbo energy just to spam sawblades is a valid strategy and easily one of the better unlockable weapons for combat.

The other "weapon" is a body part which is an uncommon drop from a dead enemy, this cheeky mechanic allows you to toss a dead body part towards another enemy for massive damage, as the game is pretty gory, it's cool to see this used as an ultimate "up yours" approach.  

During your journey, there's secret items to find but unlike most Metroidvanias, power-up based upgrades are fairly rare as most of them are locked behind a store or by achieving a top rank in the BMX races/BMX high score mini-games, so most of the time the hidden items are usually missing comic book pages, audio cassettes which allows the kid to change current background music and verses. The HP upgrades are odd as you only get an extra half of heart but nearly every enemy in the game takes away 1 full heart so there's times that every second HP upgrade doesn't seem to impact the player's survivability as much. There is also the cartridge system which function like perks to aid the player. You can have the healing perk where food items restore an extra 50% which pays off big time during tougher combat segments, magnetism which attracts money/health drops towards the player if they're close by, also a very good perk for boss fights.

Scraps as a currency feels just right for difficulty balancing, in the year 1997 at a post apocalyptic wasteland, upgrades can be bought by giving the shopkeeper lots of junk, the main upgrades are worth over 1000-2000 scraps depending on the item the player is trying to buy, scraps can be found by killing enemies & breaking common objects. There's semi-rare white boxes that have a lot of scraps inside worth around 200.

Sound

For starters, there's no voice acting other than grunts from both the player and enemies which is fine for the direction it's going for.

The music consists a mixture of old tracks from the film including 88mph (Bagu’s Bar Mix) and brand new tracks made for this game, composed by Le Matos who also worked on the film's soundtrack. You can tell his DNA is there for the new tracks with my personal favourite being the Junkyard theme as it's not only a lengthy track but it rearranges itself into another variant when entering the mall as the new instruments take over to make it sound like a fast paced level from a modern Sonic game. 

Value

There's a fair amount of stuff to do besides collecting all of the items for 100%, you could try mixing up the order where you get your weapon chips, as after I've beaten the game, I tried to start a new game and managed to clear Junkyard before obtaining my character's BMX thanks to a tricky deep slope jump.

Apple is a skin swap with a few text alterations and graphic tweaks to her melee weapon and blue "blood" which bonus points if you have seen the film. Shoutouts for allowing non-canon options to make the game more fun by allowing Apple to kick some ass.

There were plans for both speedrun and boss rush modes to be available but weren't in the final product as the respective milestones were not reached via Kickstarter. The latter is the bigger loss simply because it's a fresher experience to fight all bosses back to back and every speedrunner can agree the main story is still a valid option to speedrun the game, even with the unskippable but relatively short cutscenes.

Conclusion

Overall, the first two hours can be the hardest to navigate due to low HP and available tools but after clearing a section and getting the first weapon chip, there's a good sense of progression as the other sections become more managable. Be sure to save often whenever you approach a cyan couch as all of the checkpoints are not automatic as seen in many other modern Metroidvanias. If you want high octane 2D platformer with 80s vibes, this game is bodacious when it hits all of the right notes.

Radical

+ Neat mobility options after obtaining upgrades.

+ BMX at high speed with the spike wheel upgrade very slick.

+ Multiple choices of routes and story outcome depending on how you finish off the bosses.

+ You can throw parts from dead enemies to hit other enemies even harder.

+ Catchy OST with some tracks taken from the prequel film.

+ You DON'T need to watch the film to fully understand the game.
+ If you did watch the film, you'll know how much respect it has done with the source material.

Radifool

- Controls can feel overwhelming at times as I did mix up my dodge roll with BMX button. Same with some of the menu controls when selecting/browsing through upgrades/cartridge perks.

- Turbo energy at the start feels too low, should've been at least double/triple the amount.

- A lack of easy mode toggle to reduce damage output and longer damage invinciblity frames would've been nice as a form of accesibility, the boss fights do mitigate this with occasional health drops though.

- Not being able to instantly skip dialogue before boss battles can be annoying, especially after dying.

Rating: B+

Key provided by Overload PR
#AD mentioned as saying "Key provided", "Gifted" isn't valid terms according to the ASA rulings in the UK.