Escaping the Prison

While this review might specifically be about Escaping the Prison, you could substitute this for any of the other Henry Stickmin games from this point up to Infiltrating the Airship with minimal changes in my overall opinion. The Henry Stickmin series realises that another potential avenue to be quite a good flash game is to double down on the humour that one can pack into a game. The format of a flash game also works exceptionally well for these primarily comedic experiences due to the games not being long enough for the humour to start dragging, keeping them fresh throughout their short runtime and allowing for fast, snappy writing that doesn’t really sit still without fear of giving the player fatigue.

The humour in the game is really what makes this so great as well, somehow even managing to make pop culture references genuinely hilarious, which is a rare feat for sure. When your choice based game is making the player want to find every possible way to fail just to find another joke to laugh at, you know that you've done something right in the writing department. It's the absurdity of the situations at hand as well that contribute so strongly to this constant drive to find all failures, with the rules of the world often feeling like they change at the drop of a hat just to be able to throw in another piece of comical absurdity. I'll give this game a somewhat middling score just because it is quite short and doesn't go quite as far as some of the later games in the series would go, along with not giving the player the opportunity to jump back to a specific choice easily, but it's certainly quite an entertaining experience nonetheless.