Game: Henry Stickmin
Posted: 2025-08-13
Choose-your-own-adventure game where failing is even more fun than succeeding. I was playing those old Flash games on 4399 since elementary school. The Henry Stickmin Collection, released a lot later, was also great; though some routes in Completing the Mission weren't as fun and felt rushed. My favorite game is Fleeing the Complex, favorite route Presumed Dead, favorite track Complex Waltz.
What I loved about this game in terms of CYOA was that it doesn't feature useless choices like "go left or go right?" The closest example I can think of was in the Triple Threat route in Completing the Mission with "Henry's plan," "Ellie's plan," and "Charles's plan." But that is based on the fact that we already know enough about the characters at this point; and especially with Charles's great track record of coming up with perfect plans we can get a sense of what each character would do, so it wasn't a blind random choice.
Neither does it feature choices that changes an NPC's stats like their affection towards you or anything — like come on that's an RPG thing; what's it doing in my beloved CYOA?? I hate character stat management, let alone NPC stats.
Neither does it feature binary "do this or don't do this?" choices unless in branching points like whether to rescue Ellie in Fleeing the Complex, and even then both these choices lead to their own endings. Most of the choices is not what you want to do, but rather how do you accomplish this thing you definitely want to do. With a clear goal in mind, you choose your method of achieving it, with one success and the rest being failures.
The outcome of each choice is clearly all well-thought out. Fail scenes are funny and I'd argue an even more important part of the game than the plot itself — which is really childish (the government hiring some random outlaw to take down in exchange for freedom a gangster group flying a giant aircraft in the country's airspace? They're flying in your airspace just get the military to blast them into smithereens already), though not as much considering the developer made most of them when he was really young IIRC.
So yeah, great game. This is the greatest plan~~