Henchman Story

I went into Henchman Story half-expecting a throwaway gag game with a clever premise and nothing underneath it. What I found was a genuinely crafted visual novel that knows exactly what it wants to say and keeps saying it with wit and warmth across every scene. The writer, Marc Soskin, came up through the narrative team that earned a Nebula Award for The Outer Worlds, and that pedigree shows in how the dialogue breathes, jokes land without telegraphing, and the satire of superhero tropes has affection running through it rather than cynicism. You play as Stan, a five-year veteran henchman working for the gloriously inept Lord Bedlam. Stan guards a door nobody uses. He gets beaten up by heroes with much fancier spandex. He deals with Dave, the peppy supervisor who may or may not have a Lord Bedlam tattoo somewhere, and with the ensemble of villains, heroes, and fellow grunts that make up this wonderfully grounded pocket of a comic-book world. The choices you make in dialogue ripple forward across the roughly 200,000-word script, shaping relationships with characters like Miss Dynamo and Madame Scorpion, and steering Stan toward one of eleven distinct endings, each of which jumps ahead in time to show the weight of what you decided. Playing as cooperative Stan, sarcastic Stan, or quietly scheming Stan gives meaningfully different scenes and outcomes, this is not the kind of choice system where swapping answers produces a colour change and little else. The visual presentation is comic-book bold and expressive. Character poses and facial expressions shift dynamically in conversation, which does a lot of lifting given the static-image format. The soundtrack is original and praised by players who bother to notice it; the Music Room unlocked after a first playthrough is a small but telling touch of craftsmanship. Voice acting covers almost the entire cast and is largely excellent, Lord Bedlam and Dave are standouts, though a few action-sequence performances feel underplayed for the tension of the moment, and Stan's internal monologues are delivered in silence, which is jarring early on before the rhythm settles in. The real limitation is scope. A single run clocks in around three to four hours, and while a weekend is enough to see most endings, some reviewers found the world so alive that they wished for another thirty thousand words of it. The romance routes are heterosexual only, which some players have noted as a gap in an otherwise inclusive-feeling cast. Neither of these kills the experience, but they are honest observations worth weighing. For visual novel fans who want density and length, Henchman Story leaves you wanting more of a good thing rather than satisfied with what you got, which, depending on your temperament, reads as a minor flaw or an endorsement. For anyone who loves the kind of small game that has one clear vision and executes it cleanly, this is exactly that. It launched in October 2021 with nearly universal acclaim from the small circle of critics who covered it, and its Steam player rating has held at 96 percent positive, a number that says more about genuine word-of-mouth than a marketing push. The developer is a one-person narrative shop, and the care in the script shows on every page.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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