The Henry Stickmin Collection

I grew up refreshing Newgrounds for the next Henry Stickmin drop, so coming back to this collection felt less like playing a game and more like opening a time capsule that someone had quietly filled with better art, cleaner sound, and a proper ending. PuffballsUnited essentially rebuilt the entire series from the ground up: Breaking the Bank was reanimated frame by frame, the middle chapters had backgrounds and audio redone, and then Completing the Mission - a brand-new, exclusive finale - capped everything off at roughly triple the size of any single episode in the run. The loop is deceptively simple. Each scene presents you with a small menu of options: teleporter, calling in your buddy Charles, brute force, something obviously chaotic. You pick one. It either works and the scene continues, or Henry dies in a way that is usually the actual joke. Deaths accumulate in your fail collection, which means the game quietly incentivises you to press every wrong answer on purpose. That design philosophy - failing is the content - keeps the whole thing feeling light even when you are technically losing over and over. The writing earns most of its laughs through sharp comic timing rather than shock value, and it holds up better than a lot of internet humour from the same era. Completing the Mission is the real centrepiece. It structures itself around the endings you earned in earlier chapters, meaning Henry can roll into the finale as a government agent, the head of the Toppat Clan criminal syndicate, a pardoned thief, or half a dozen other flavours depending on which paths you took. The branching here is genuinely different from episode to episode, not just cosmetically relabelled cutscenes. Side characters like Ellie Rose and the dependably warm Charles add personality that you genuinely miss when they are absent from a given route. The honest caveats: the core playthrough is short. Experienced players can clear everything in four to six hours, and once you have seen a failure screen, you have seen it. Achievement hunting and bio collection extend the runtime, but the bio grind in particular is the kind of completionist chore that requires sitting through scenes you have already memorised. There are also reported stability issues in fullscreen mode that have not been fully resolved. And if deadpan slapstick is not your register, none of this will land - the whole package leans hard into a specific comic sensibility that either clicks instantly or doesn't click at all. What makes this collection worth talking about years after release is how carefully PuffballsUnited preserved the handmade feeling of the originals while still making them actually playable today. There is no attempt to modernise the format beyond what the format needs. It trusts that the comedy, the choices, and the small hand-drawn world are enough. For what it is - a lovingly restored piece of internet animation history with a satisfying original chapter bolted on - it delivers exactly what it promises and knows precisely when to stop.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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