Infiltrating the Airship

Every stage of Infiltrating the Airship presents Henry with a small menu of plans, most of which are terrible, and all of which are animated in full before the game tells you whether you just succeeded or ended the mission. That gap — the moment between picking an option and watching it play out — is the joke PuffballsUnited built an entire series around, and this 2013 entry is where the formula grew from a gag reel into something with real structure.

The job and the target

Henry has been recruited by the government to bring down the Toppat Clan, a top-hatted criminal outfit operating out of an enormous airship. This is the game that introduced two of the series' most-quoted characters: Charles Calvin, the endlessly agreeable helicopter pilot, and Reginald Copperbottom, the Toppat leader whose right-hand man goes on to become a recurring problem in later games. Boarding the airship in the first place is the opening puzzle; what you do once you are inside is where the game opens up.

Choices that fork instead of just failing

The earlier games — Breaking the Bank, Escaping the Prison, Stealing the Diamond — were mostly linear strings of choices with a handful of endings hanging off the last few decisions. Airship restructures that. Early on you commit to a broad approach, and that commitment sends you down a genuinely different sequence of scenes with its own cast, its own set-pieces and its own named ending. Four distinct endings exist, including the government-sanctioned route, the straightforward infiltration, the one where Henry ends up on the Toppats' side, and the one that hands him over to a containment agency.

Failing is cheap and expected. A wrong option plays out as a short animated pratfall, then drops you back at the same decision point with that option greyed out, so nothing is ever lost except the seconds it took to watch. The game assumes you will see most of the failures deliberately.

Controls

Getting the most out of a first run

• Watch the fails on purpose. Roughly half the writing in the game is in the options that do not work. Skipping them to reach an ending means missing the actual content.
• Note where the path splits. Once you recognise the decision that sends you down a route, you can jump back to it later to open the other branches instead of replaying from the start.
• Read the option art, not just the labels. The icons telegraph the reference or the gag, and often hint at whether an option is a serious attempt or a punchline.
• Chase all four endings. Each route has scenes the others never show, and the series' continuity in later games depends on which ending you treat as canonical.
• Do not rush the cutscenes. The animation is the reward; the choices are just the interface.

Why the series stuck

Henry Stickmin worked because it took stick-figure art — the cheapest possible visual style, and by 2013 a punchline in itself — and paired it with animation timing good enough to sell a joke. The humour is heavy on video game and film references, delivered without commentary, so the game trusts you to catch them. Airship is usually the point where people who tried the earlier shorts realise the series has ambitions beyond a single gag.

It also has a second life outside the browser: the whole series was rebuilt with new art, voice work and additional routes as The Henry Stickmin Collection, released in 2020. The Flash original is still the version worth playing if you want to see what the 2013 audience saw, branch points and all.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where does Infiltrating the Airship fall in the Henry Stickmin order? It is the fourth game, following Breaking the Bank, Escaping the Prison and Stealing the Diamond, and preceding Fleeing the Complex.

How many endings does it have? Four, each reached through a different route rather than a single last-minute decision.

Do I need to have played the earlier games? No, but Airship is the first game to pay off running jokes and characters from the previous entries, so the callbacks land harder if you have seen them.

Who is Charles Calvin? Henry's pilot contact on the government route, introduced in this game and a fixture of the series afterwards. His unflappable enthusiasm for whatever Henry suggests is a large part of why that route is the fan favourite.

Is this the same as the version in the Steam collection? No. This is the original Flash release. The 2020 collection reanimated it and added material that was never in this build.