Henry Stickmin

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The Henry Stickmin series is a series of Choose Your Own Adventure stick figure games created by Puffballs United on Newgrounds.

The games focus on the titular Henry Stickmin, who starts off as a Villain Protagonist who tries to break into a bank. Later installments have him attempting to do other tasks, such as stealing a valuable diamond from a museum or attempting to break out of a high-security criminal asylum. Depending on the player's choices, he may have the aid of other characters, such as Charles Calvin, a helicopter pilot who works for the government, and Ellie Rose, whom Henry has the option of helping in Fleeing the Complex.

The series is best known for the many, many hilarious fails that can happen to Henry while he's trying to complete missions. Each installment (save for the original flash version of Breaking the Bank) even has achievements for finding all of the fails in each game.

Although the series technically began in 2007 with a prototype game, titled Crossing the Pit, 2008 marked the true start of the series with the release of Breaking the Bank. The series was then followed by Escaping the Prison, Stealing the Diamond, Infiltrating the Airship, and Fleeing the Complex, each respectively released in 2010, 2011, 2013, and 2015.

The series eventually concluded with The Henry Stickmin Collection, which was released to Steam on August 7, 2020. This features remastered versions of the previous five Henry Stickmin games, as well as the sixth and final game, Completing the Mission. In October 2023, Let's Player GrayStillPlays released an hour-and-a-half video of him playing the entire storyline.

Tropes used in Henry Stickmin include:

• Agony of the Feet: During the "Just Plain Epic" route in Stealing the Diamond, after Henry successfully manages to break into the museum, he has the option to use a bomb on the security guards. But the bomb itself is not a live bomb, and if Henry does try to use it, the bomb will just land right on one of the feet of Dave, one of the museum's security guards.
• The Alcatraz: The Wall in Fleeing the Complex. Despite all the increased security, the guards having spears that can shoot lasers, and the fact that, up until then, nobody was able to escape for fifty years, Henry (and Ellie, if you choose to take her with you) still manages to break out.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: In the "Just Plain Epic" route of Stealing the Diamond, Henry becomes a giant after touching a golden mushroom.
• Big Bad: Reginald Copperbottom, the leader of the Toppat Clan, serves as this in Infiltrating the Airship, the "Betrayed" route in Fleeing the Complex, and some of the routes in Completing the Mission.
• Born Lucky/Born Unlucky: One of the captions in the loading screen shown at the beginning of the original Flash version of Infiltrating the Airship describes Henry as being simultaneously lucky and unlucky.
• Captain Ersatz/Writing Around Trademarks: In the remastered version of Escaping the Prison, Phoenix Wright of Ace Attorney fame is renamed Felix White.
• Cyborg:
  • In Completing the Mission, Right Hand Man is depicted as one in each of the routes that spawn off the "Relentless Bounty Hunter" or "Rapidly Promoted Executive" routes from Infiltrating the Airship.
  • Henry himself becomes one in the "Revenged" route of Completing the Mission. Unfortuneatley for him, he dies again after being shot in the back by Reginald.
• The Dog Bites Back: If the player chooses the "Toppat Civil Warfare" route in Completing the Mission, Henry's decision to abandon Ellie comes back to bite him in the butt when Ellie manages to break into the Toppat Clan's airship and turn most of the Toppats against Henry.
• Early Installment Weirdness:
  • The art style in Breaking the Bank is more simplistic than the art style in all subsequent games. In addition, none of the options had the iconic "Fail" screens. These were fixed in the 2020 remaster.
  • Each of the endings in the original Flash versions of Escaping the Prison and Stealing the Diamond had simple names (E.G. the "Sneaky Ending" in Escaping the Prison or the "Epic Ending" in Stealing the Diamond). In the 2020 remasters, they are given more elaborate names, such as "Sneaky Escapist" in Escaping the Prison, or "Just Plain Epic" in Stealing the Diamond.
• Foreshadowing: In the remastered version of Escaping the Prison, if you collect Sally Cue's bio card during the "Badass Bust Out" route, her bio card will mention her often getting mistaken for someone else despite not having red hair. Also doubles as a Mythology Gag, as her hair actually was red in the original flash version of the game.
• Game-Breaking Bug: Invoked on three different occasions:
  • One of the fails in the "Just Plain Epic" route in Stealing the Diamond has Henry spawn MissingNo of Pokémon fame. However, when he does this, the game cuts to a screen resembling the Windows Blue Screen of Death, with a binary message on the "Fail" screen which translates to "Fear MissingNo."
  • In the "Pure Blooded Theif" route of Infiltrating the Airship, if Wilson chooses to load the disc labeled "G.A.B.E.N.," the game will glitch out as a weapon begins to emerge.
  • If Henry uses the CorrupTick in the Theif/Allies route of Completing the Mission, the game will glitch out and cut to the title screen. When the player clicks "OK" on a message that says "Completing the Mission encountered an error. Returning to previous location...", the game reloads, but Henry and Ellie will now be perpetually T-posing, while the Bukowski twins will spaz out.
• The Ghost: Gadget Gabe, the person who gives reviews of various devices Henry tries to use on his quests, is never seen.
• Have a Nice Death/It's a Wonderful Failure: The games are well-known for all the "Fail" screens and their snarky commentary.
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: The titles for every game in the series follow the "[verb]-ing the [noun]" pattern.
• Informed Flaw: Some of the "Fail" messages joke about Henry supposedly being fat, even though he, like most of the other characters in the games, has the appearance of a skinny stick figure.
• Jail Bake: Escaping the Prison begins with Henry receiving a cake from an anonymous source. Said cake is filled with items that Henry can use to escape.
• Man Child: Charles has shades of this. He's competent enough to help Henry (and Ellie in the "Triple Threat" ending in Completing the Mission) get the job done, but he seems to have a somewhat childish obsession with crashing his helicopter into stuff and someimes sings while on missions (such as when he sings a song about crawling through vents during the "Valiant Hero" ending in Completing the Mission).
• The Multiverse: It's implied that there are multiple universes that occur whenever Henry either succeeds or fails. This is all but confirmed in the secret ending for Completing the Mission, when Ellias Bahtchin, an employee who works for the Center for Chaos Containment, presses a button that fixes the multiverse imbalance that resulted from all of the possible fails and endings the player found throughout the series.
• Mythology Gag: At one point during the "Jewel Baron" route in Completing the Mission, Henry tries to figure out how to get across the gravity chamber in the Toppat Orbital Station. The entire sequence mirrors Crossing the Pit, the prototype game for the series. The only difference is that this time, the teleporter actually works in Henry's favor.
• The Quiet One: Henry himself. Outside of grunting or screaming whenever he dies, he rarely, if ever, speaks in full sentences (or at least he does on-screen, anyway).
• Running Gag:
  • At one point in each game, Henry has the option to use a teleporter, but doing so almost always results in him dying in some way (except for the "Unseen Burglar" route in Stealing the Diamond and the "Jewel Baron" route in Completing the Mission).
  • Starting with Infiltrating the Airship, Henry can call on Charles to help him out. The problem is, though, that Charles' "plans" always involve him ramming his helicopter into things. Although this actually does work in the "Valient Hero" route of Completing the Mission.
• Shout Out:
  • Infiltrating the Airship:
    • SpongeBob: One of the death screens is: We'll take our problems and PUSH them somewhere else!
• Slapstick Knows No Gender: If Ellie teams up with Henry, she can and will get hurt and/or die about as much as Henry does.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Dave Panpa, a rookie police officer at West Mesa Penitentiary, is indirectly responsible for the events of Escaping the Prison and onward, as he didn't check the cake that he delivered to Henry.
• Take a Third Option: Occurs near the end of the Thief/Allies route in Completing the Mission when Henry and Ellie are forced to choose between joining either the Toppat Clan or the government. Other than the aforementioned choices, they can also choose to either side with the Wall, or just jump out of the rocket owned by the Toppats. The latter two options both end in failure.
• Women Are Wiser: If she teams up with Henry, Ellie will act as the brains of the two. This is perhaps best shown in one of the fails during the "Triple Threat" route in Completing the Mission when Charles suggests crashing into the Toppats' rocket, with Henry giving an approving thumbs-up, while Ellie just replies, "But, how does that help?" That said, Ellie still has moments where she acts as stupidly as Henry.