Fleeing the Complex

The Wall is a maximum-security prison carved into a frozen mountainside, staffed by armed guards and surrounded by nothing at all. It is a long way from the small-town cell of the earlier games, and that escalation is deliberate: by November 2015, when PuffballsUnited released Fleeing the Complex, the Henry Stickmin series had grown from a browser sketch into a genuinely ambitious piece of animation.

The Wall

Henry begins the game locked up after the events of Infiltrating the Airship, and the facility he needs to get out of is built to make that impossible. Where the earlier prison was a room with bars, this one is a complex — cell blocks, corridors, a canteen, a perimeter fence, and open snow beyond it. Escaping it takes multiple stages rather than one clever trick, and each stage presents its own fan of options.

The consequence is that a single playthrough is long enough to feel like a story rather than a gag. You can get partway out, meet somebody, commit to a plan, and still have most of the escape ahead of you. Earlier entries branched and ended quickly. This one branches and keeps going.

Ellie Rose and Picking a Side

The most significant thing Fleeing the Complex adds to the series is a second person. Ellie Rose is a fellow inmate, and on some routes she becomes a partner rather than a background character — the escape turns into a two-hander, with dialogue and a working relationship. She went on to become one of the series' central characters, and this is where she arrives.

She is also part of a wider change in how the game handles its endings. Rather than simply succeeding or failing, the routes here place Henry with a faction. He can end up aligned with the Toppat Clan, the criminal outfit that runs through the whole series. He can end up working with the government. He can leave with Ellie. Each of these is a legitimate conclusion, and each one carries a different set of implications for who Henry is by the time the credits roll. Choosing an ending stopped being about getting out and started being about what you get out as.

Controls

You are shown a spread of options — tools, actions, one-liners — and you click the one you want. Some appear under time pressure, so hovering over them to read before committing is not always available.

What Makes This One Different to Play

• Failures are set pieces now. Wrong choices still end in a captioned fail, but the animation budget behind them here is far beyond the earlier games. Several run longer than an entire branch of the original prison break.
• Options are less predictable. There is rarely a sensible-looking answer among the choices, and the joke is frequently that the absurd option is the one that works.
• Sound carries a lot of it. The voice work and music are doing real dramatic work, particularly on the Ellie routes. It is worth playing with sound on.

The honest way to approach it is the same as any Henry Stickmin game: fail everything on purpose. The game returns you to the last decision immediately, so there is no cost to picking the obviously stupid option first, and the obviously stupid option is where the writing is.

The Last Flash Chapter

Fleeing the Complex was the fifth and final entry made as a browser game, closing a run that began with Breaking the Bank and continued through Escaping the Prison, Stealing the Diamond, and Infiltrating the Airship. In 2020 all five were remastered and released together as The Henry Stickmin Collection, which added a new final chapter and reworked the art throughout.

Played in order, it is the payoff — a series of choices that were once throwaway gags turned into something with actual consequences.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ellie Rose? An inmate Henry can meet during the escape. On certain routes she joins him and the two of you get out together, and she becomes a recurring figure in the series afterwards.

How many different endings are there? Several, and they are defined by who Henry ends up aligned with rather than simply whether he escapes — the Toppat Clan, the government, or Ellie among them.

Should I play Escaping the Prison and Infiltrating the Airship first? It works on its own, but Henry is imprisoned here because of what happened in Infiltrating the Airship, and the Toppat Clan has history stretching back through the series.

What is the Wall? The prison the game is set in: a heavily guarded facility in a remote, snowbound location, considerably larger and better defended than anywhere Henry has been held before.

Does choosing wrong waste my time? No. A failed choice replays from that same decision point, and the failure animations are a substantial part of what the game has to offer.

Is this the last Henry Stickmin game? It was the last one released as a standalone browser title, in November 2015. The 2020 Henry Stickmin Collection remastered all five and added a further chapter.