It is a classic British comedy setup. An unknown junior salesman at a large firm is sent on a seemingly mundane trip to an idiosyncratic town – and chaos ensues. Right from the beginning, this wonderful game from tiny studio Coal Supper makes it clear it is going to load this premise with as much slapstick and surrealism as possible. When it’s time to leave the opening sequence, set in a tenth-storey office, the player is forced to do so via the window, their fall broken by the very bus they need to catch for their journey.
When you reach the fictitious Northern English town of Barnsworth, a grim reincarnation of early 1980s Barnsley, you’re supposed to be meeting the mayor but he’s busy, so out on to the streets you go. Here you discover a menagerie of weird characters, drawn in queasily bright colours and a deceptively childlike style, usually greeting you with the words “thank goodness you’re here” before coralling you to help them with a ridiculous crisis. This might be a portly gentlemen who has got his arm stuck in a drain, or a chip shop owner whose fryer is broken, or a senile admiral who needs you to collect his gulls. But wherever you go – through market places, across rooftops, or down ginnels – you will meet more oddballs with odd jobs, as the world’s weird logic and spiralling geography trap you into servile confusion. You wanted to play a cross between a Flann O’Brien novel and an episode of Dick and Dom in da Bungalow? You’ve got it.
On the subject of comedic influences, the creators have namechecked Reeves and Mortimer and the Mighty Boosh as inspirations. However, the interplay of slapstick, surreality and pop art hark back further to Monty Python, Yellow Submarine and the gently subversive comics of the 1980s such as Whoopee and Whizzer and Chips. Fear not, however: you don’t have to know any of this to enjoy this game’s sheer vivacity and dark charm.
What might help is a passing knowledge of Northern working-class stereotypes. The number of shops with rhyming names (Doug’s Rugs, Nick’s Bricks and my favourite, the mobile phone market stall named Raj’s Chargers); the unhealthy dietary offerings (a fast food truck selling Porky Nobbers, the cart selling “oily baps”); and an almost psychotic rivalry between pie bakers.
But miss any of these and many other japes crop up as you locate keys and hammers, or get a shy boy to ask for milk, or just enjoy the voice-acting contributions of Matt Berry who, along with the rest of the talented cast, really brings these weirdos to life. In between the main quests, which work a lot like the puzzles in the old Dizzy games from Codemasters in the way they domino into each other, there are utterly bizarre sequences in which you have to explore the surface of a steak or collect a spirit level bubble.
There are sly little digs at the games industry, too. On one wall a piece of graffiti shows a man peeing on the words “ludonarrative” and in a squalid sewer area between two locations a sign says, “Liminal spaces may be less engaging than they appear”. Indeed, the whole game, with its relentless sequence of fetch tasks, could be read as a pastiche on the wearying convention of the open-world side quest.
There are so many ideas, sight gags, word-plays, plants and payoffs crammed into the game’s three-hour run time, you’ll need another couple of playthroughs to catch them all. It is such a joy to play something so utterly and uncompromisingly silly – yet, like a lot of the daftest British humour, the game also carries a quiet undertone of unease and desperation. The pie men, the town drunk, the milk-shy child – they’re all trapped in quiet personal hells that just happen to be hilarious to the rest of us.
In the future, when the subject of the funniest comedy games of all time crops up, the usual names will be there – Monkey Island, The Stanley Parable, Death Stranding (I’m kidding) – but now surely a new one will join them. Coal Supper has produced perhaps the first great abstract Yorkshire-based cartoon puzzler of the 21st century. Thank goodness.