3 Short, Charming Games for Labor Day Weekend

As summer draws to a close, let’s hope that the brutal heat waves will continue to recede. If you’re looking to spend a luxuriant weekend indoors, here are three relatively short games that will make you laugh, test your platforming skills and allow for a bit of aesthetic creativity.

Thank Goodness You’re Here!

Imagine a place where your preferred size of the meat pie might lead a chap to say, “No daughter of mine is going with a big pie man!” Set in the fictional northern England town of Barnsworth — but imbued with the spirit of Yorkshire — Thank Goodness You’re Here! is a stout concoction of British tomfoolery that blends bawdy, slapstick and demented comedy, with possibly another register or two that I missed being the untutored Yank I am. (I was “reyt” grateful for the subtitles.)

The game plops you in the role of a traveling salesman who has been sent from his home office to have a sit-down with the mayor responsible for a little spot of flyover country. Alas, the local bigwig is tied up when you arrive so you’re left with nothing to do except explore the local habitat. Your much put-upon character is a tie-wearing little fella with a boyish mug and a receding hairline in a world of bigger folk with silly chores to complete. Think: hopping on a lawn mower and decapitating a serenading flower, or sinking into a slice of steak at a butcher’s shop and learning the personal trauma of a sausage link.

The game’s mechanics are straightforward: walk, run, jump and slap. Slapping people is encouraged if you want to hear their daffy lines. (I’m stopping myself from describing one funny reaction to bum slapping.) In addition to some basic platforming sections, the variety of the situations our traveling salesman finds himself in gives Thank Goodness You’re Here! brisk momentum.

As someone who is not an aficionado of British comedy, I confess that I was skeptical when one of the first gags was sliding a glob of butter to a hapless man in need of lubricant owing to his arm being caught in a drainage gate. Yet by the second half of the game I found myself regularly chortling aloud over the goings of the town’s inhabitants, especially Jasper the handyman, who suspects — incorrectly, but not without reason! — that his neighbors have pinched his tools. By the time I reached the finale, which brings several narrative threads together into a rollicking celebration of work, I was fully charmed.