What if Balatro was a cookie clicker card battler? Well, this, it seems.

Like Balatro, you have a deck of cards that – over time – you can modify to add or remove cards, and have special cards that add extra points or multipliers to hands you play. Unlike Balatro, hands played are automatic – you just click the deck and a hand is dealt. Quickly, you get the ability to autodeal hands on a timer, just like in cookie clicker games.

As you score points based on poker hands played, you spend those points on upgrades, like more decks, cards, multipliers for different hand types, and so on. Eventually you get loads of decks running at the same time, with seven cards in a dealt, and extra poker hands like five of a kind or a 7 card straight. Numbers go up, you get bonuses for “resetting” the game and permanent upgrades that persist (and can only be obtained by) resets. Just like any number of “modern” incremental clicker type games.

Only, there’s more. Because the plot is that Jester, the clown on the artwork, has actually trapped you and you have to make money to pay for your release. Naturally, he reneges this deal and you have to actually fight him. It’s here the card battling, albeit automated, comes into play.

It’s a surprisingly deep, and short (which works in its favour), game of the genre. It’s a bit fiddly to play on the Steam Deck because some of the text is impossible to read even when zoomed in, but luckily there’s nothing that important you miss. If the devs could just scale everything up a bit for the Deck, it would be amazing.

This was a quick play after Thank Goodness You’re Here!, and it’s sort of a prototype for what that game ended up being. It’s more abstract, but still very silly.

This time, you’re a sort of naked onionman thing who has to find food for a creature in order to progress. There’s not a lot to it, but it was enjoyable enough – and free on Steam! Bargain.

Sometimes, a game comes along which is properly hilarious. Sure, there are funny games, and games with funny events or “player made” hilarity, but it’s rare for a funny game to be this funny.

Thank Goodness You’re Here! is what we used to call an arcade adventure game. I suppose, in some ways, it’s the spiritual successor to such British 8-bit computer games as Everyone’s A Wally and Jack the Nipper. You, as a little (although his size randomly changes somehow) yellow man have arrived at the mayor’s office only to find you’ve some time to kill so wander outside. Then begins a ridiculous chain of events across this northern town where you’re expected to help out in various stupid and nonsensical ways.

For example, one of your first tasks involves freeing a portly gentleman who has reached into a drain to reach a tuppence and got his arm stuck. Off you go to the bakery to nick a load of butter with which to lubricate the arm, which frees him and reveals it to actually be a thruppence, not a tuppence. What joy!

Other tasks include arranging smoking fish in a fishmongers, repeatedly annoying a quiet old man by plopping through his chimney sooting up his living room, and fetching meat to make pies. There’s a huge number of proper Northern people who populate this town, ably voiced by Matt Berry and Jon Blyth, amongst others, who add even more silliness to the proceedings. Events that just happen around you, like the singing rats in bins, the Sausage Man, and the chap who sells bricks, as well as a few romances and rivalries (there’s a near war in the Big Pie vs Little Pie side story). Every few seconds there’s a funny event, new character, or bit of dialogue, and it all feels a bit Python-y and a bit On The Buses-y in the best possible way. There’s also a load of adverts for in-universe products which are hilarious.

The gameplay is pretty simple, mostly involving some minor platforming and fetch and carry requests punctuated with a bit of exploration and pathfinding as various areas are revisited in different ways as routes open up or close. That’s not a criticism like it might be with a “straight” game, as the point here is to enjoy the people and the setting (and the accents) more than the gameplay itself which is mostly just the vehicle to progress the story and events.

It’s a really unique game, and I wish I could forget all about it so I can play it again and re-discover it all.

A game with toilets in it? Surely not. And me, here, with enough spare change in my Steam account from selling trading cards to afford to buy it? Serendipity!

I went in knowing almost nothing about the game, except that it has toilets in it and you’re trapped in the toilets. And that is pretty much all there is to know. You’ve gone into the toilets of a party and then the door to the gents seems to have vanished from the inside and you’re stuck. There are urinals, a couple of sinks, and some cubicles (one locked, one locked and occupied) and you’ve got to escape.

In my head, I was expecting a first-person version of classic Spectrum text adventure series Behind Closed Doors, where the premise is similar, and in a way that’s what I’ve got. You have to find and use items to gain access to other items and areas, but it’s all a bit surreal and there are many ways you can die. Some, like the grenade, are obvious. Some, like the giant tentacle that comes out of nowhere or the humana-humana Squidward are… less so.

There are a load of achievements for “finishing” the game in various ways, although by “finishing” I mean, most are Game Over as you die. I did get two separate “good” (or as close to “good” as it got) endings, as well as all the achievements for the bad ones (which included those in the free DLC that gives you access to another area), so I think I’ve covered “completed”.

A very silly game, but absolutely the sort of nonsense I want more of, please.

I can’t tell you about this game too much because it will spoil it for you. What I can say, it’s a sort of simplified Trials game (you know, that motorbike on a 2D track thing) but also that it isn’t.

It’s also not very long, is very free (on Steam), and it’s by Nifflas who you might know from such games as Knytt and Affordable Space Adventure.