Escaping the Prison

A guard slides a package through the bars. Inside is a cake, and inside the cake is whatever you decide to put there. That single moment is the hinge of Escaping the Prison, the second of PuffballsUnited's Henry Stickmin games and the one that turned a small stick-figure joke into a series people followed for years.

The Package in the Cell

Henry is behind bars because of a bank robbery, and the game opens with him already caught and already sentenced. Your first real decision is the contents of the cake: an energy drink, a teleporter, or a cell phone. Each one sends the story somewhere completely different, and the game makes no attempt to hint which is correct — because the honest answer is that most of them are not.

Take the energy drink and Henry gets strong enough to bend the bars of his cell, which works exactly as well as you would expect for a man with a heart. Take the teleporter and he does leave the building, arriving somewhere considerably worse than the cell he started in. Take the cell phone and the game stops being a prison break and becomes a courtroom drama.

That structure — a small number of genuine forks, each unfolding into further choices — is what the series was built on.

Trials, Evidence, and the Robbery That Put Him Here

The phone branch is the one that makes Escaping the Prison different from every other game in the series. Henry calls a lawyer, and the scene cuts to a trial where you are the one choosing which piece of evidence to present. A money bag. A shovel. A strange device. Security camera footage. A letter from the detective on the case. Floor plans of the bank.

Some of these help. Several are, on any sensible reading, confessions. Working out which is which means paying attention to the flashbacks the trial keeps cutting to, and those flashbacks are also how you learn what Henry actually did. The story is told out of order, and you piece the robbery together through the lens of a man defending himself badly.

Controls

Every input in the game is a click on an on-screen option. Some choices are presented with a short window to react, so it is worth reading the icons before the scene reaches them.

Failing on Purpose

You are supposed to lose. Most branches end in a scripted failure with a pun stamped across the screen, and those failures are the content — they are more elaborately animated than the successes and they are where nearly all the jokes live.

Nothing is lost when you fail. The game drops you back at the decision that ended you, so exploring the tree costs nothing but the seconds it takes to watch the animation. There are three routes that genuinely get Henry out, each with its own named ending, and the reasonable way to play is to deliberately exhaust every wrong turn on the way to finding them.

A few things worth knowing before you start:

• Replay the same fork with different items rather than restarting from scratch. The branches diverge early and share almost nothing.
• Watch the animation through to the end even when you know you have failed. The punchline is usually in the last two seconds.
• The trial branch has more depth than either escape attempt, so save it for when you have exhausted the physical routes.

Where It Sits in the Series

Breaking the Bank came first and was almost a prototype: every choice in it fails, by design. Escaping the Prison took the same interface and gave it real stakes, multiple successful outcomes, and a cast worth caring about. Stealing the Diamond, Infiltrating the Airship, and Fleeing the Complex followed, and all five were later remastered together with an additional chapter as The Henry Stickmin Collection in 2020.

If you are starting the series here, you are starting in the right place.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the three items I can choose from in the cake? An energy drink, a teleporter, and a cell phone. Each opens a separate branch of the story with its own set of follow-up choices.

How many ways are there to actually escape? Three branches lead to a genuine escape, and each is given its own ending title. The rest of the tree is made up of scripted failures.

What is the trial section? Choosing the cell phone leads Henry to a lawyer and then to a courtroom, where you select which piece of evidence to present — a money bag, a shovel, a device, security footage, a letter, or bank floor plans.

Does failing lose my progress? No. Each failure returns you to the choice that caused it, so you can work through every option without replaying the scenes you have already seen.

Which Henry Stickmin game is this? It is the second, following Breaking the Bank. The robbery referenced throughout the trial is the events of that earlier game.

Why does the story jump around in time? The trial scenes are told as flashbacks interleaved with the present, so the account of the robbery is revealed gradually rather than in order.