Just the title alone had me putting in a review request for this one. From developer Perfectly Paranormal and publisher Yogscast Games comes The Holy Gosh Darn, a time-travelling humours romp through Heaven, Hell and even Earth.

“Play as Cassiel, a foul-mouthed angel trapped in a time loop with a mission to save Heaven. Use the magical clock bestowed upon you from Death (yes, that Death, from Manual Samuel, stop asking) to jump between timelines across Heaven, Hell, Earth and Helheim to stop Heaven from going boom.”

Did you ever play The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask? If so, that’s pretty much how The Holy Gosh Darn works – which is a good thing because Majora’s Mask is one of my favourite games. The basic plot here is that you play as an angel and Heaven is destroyed when a plague of phantoms attack. With Heaven gone, you are tasked, by Death, to go back in time and stop the attack from happening. Only, there’s a bit of a problem – you only have 6 in-game hours… which is about 20 minutes in real-time. So yeah, you have only 20 minutes to save Heaven.

Just like Majora’s Mask, your very tight time limit will have you jumping forwards and backwards in time until you can come up with a plan (or multiple changing plans) to complete your goal. So, that 20 minutes then becomes several hours. I am going to delve into a light and vague spoiler here to explain how it all works, as I briefly go through the first major puzzle of the game. So, you need to get a key to open a vault and St. Peter overseeing the gates of Heaven has it – only he won’t just hand it over to you. Peter wants you to tell him a secret about himself, and he won’t tell you that secret unless everyone is about to die. So you have to go forward in time to just before Heaven is destroyed, and just before everyone dies, for Peter to tell you his secret. Then, you go back to the start of the day and tell Peter his secret (that he has not yet told you in the timeline, but did tell you in the future) and he will give you the key. Does that make sense?

This is how you progress through the game, by jumping forwards and backwards in time. As I said, it’s very Majora’s Mask. When you do go back in time, you will lose any inventory items that you picked up, but you retain any information. This comes in very handy for discovering shortcuts that will help you save time in your already tight time limit. How you talk to people is pretty important too. Some people won’t really mind if you ask them to cut the chatter and tell them to get to the point, Others will think you are rude and refuse to talk to you any more. Still, this is a time travel game and if you do piss anyone off, just rewind time and try a different approach.

Don’t let the title of The Holy Gosh Darn fool you, it may sound slightly sanitised, but the game itself is crammed with adult humour. There’s swearing in this game – lots of swearing, even from the angels. The humour here is fantastic, and there is a brilliant balance between puerile toilet humour (you do meet a character who is a literal arse-face and communicate with via farting) and more highbrow and clever humour. Then there are plenty of references to the devs’ previous titles, Manual Samuel and Helheim Hassle. The puzzles have been put together well and as long as you think fourth dimensionally (thanks Doc Brown), you’ll never get stuck and the answer is found using some simple logic and time travel. There’s this one bit involving playing a table-top game that… I’m not going to spoil here.

As this game does use time travel a great deal, there is a lot of going back, retracing your steps and revisiting the same locations over and over. This may come off as being very repetitive to some, I personally loved it because the world still goes about its business as you play and being in the same location at different times may just reveal a secret or three. As I said before, it is all very The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask, which I love. The graphics here are great, bright, and colourful, and there’s some top-notch voice acting to keep the dialogue and story thoroughly entertaining.

Priced at around £17 and available now for everything, The Holy Gosh Darn is one of the most refreshing and fun games I have played in 2024. I got to the end credits in around 5 hours, but I do know that I didn’t do and see everything that the game has to offer. There’s a sub-quest running all through the game where you can find and insult Heavenly Elders, which I didn’t do, and I only tinkered with a few of the other distractions that the game offers. There is a Game + mode, which I have not yet tried, but will be diving into it right after I have published this review. Majora’s Mask meets Monkey Island – The Holy Gosh Darn is a brilliantly written and crafted time travel adventure that’ll make you laugh as much as it’ll have you working the old grey matter. Get this game played.