Stealing the Diamond

A diamond the size of a football is sitting in a glass case in a museum, and Henry Stickmin has decided it belongs to him. That is the entire setup for Stealing the Diamond, and what makes it work is that the game expects you to fail. Every screen offers a handful of icons — a plan, a tool, an idea of varying quality — and most of them lead nowhere except to a short animated punchline about how badly it went. Choosing wrong is not a penalty here. It is the content.

The Museum Job

PuffballsUnited built the game as a Flash release on Newgrounds, and it follows the studio's established pattern: a stick figure with unwarranted confidence, a series of decision points, and a joke waiting behind almost every option. The target is the Tunisian Diamond, on public display and much better guarded than Henry has accounted for.

The heist splits into stages that mirror any caper film. Getting into the building. Getting to the case. Getting out with the thing in hand. At each stage the screen freezes, a small grid of choices appears, and you pick one. A wrong pick plays out as a self-contained cartoon, tags itself with a caption, and drops you back to try again with that option greyed out. A right pick advances the plan and immediately presents a new set of choices, several of which will also be wrong.

Failure as the Main Attraction

Most adventure games treat a bad ending as something to be avoided. This one treats it as a collectible. The fail animations are longer and more elaborate than the successes, they escalate in absurdity as the heist goes on, and they are the reason the game is remembered. A player who reaches the diamond on the first attempt has arguably seen less of the game than someone who has crashed out a dozen times.

Because of that, the sensible way to play is to deliberately exhaust the wrong answers before taking the one that works. Nothing is lost by doing so — there is no attempt counter, no resource to burn and no time limit. The game simply rewinds a few seconds and lets you keep going.

There is also more than one way for the heist to actually succeed. The route you take through the museum shapes the ending you get, so finishing once does not mean you have seen everything the game has to show.

Controls

Everything is clicked. Some later sequences insert a quick reaction prompt, so keep the cursor near the middle of the frame during animations.

Getting the Most Out of a Run

• Click every option. Work through each grid exhaustively before advancing. Skipping options skips the jokes, and the jokes are what you came for.
• Read the captions. Each failure is titled, and the titles carry a lot of the humour that the animation alone does not.
• Do not rush the animations. A few of them have a second beat after you think they have ended.
• Replay for the other routes. Once you have completed the job one way, start again and commit to a different approach at the branch points to reach a different conclusion.
• Keep the sound on. The timing of the punchlines leans heavily on audio cues and stings.

Why It Still Holds Up

Stealing the Diamond is short — a full run takes minutes — but the density of jokes per minute is very high, and the animation is far more expressive than plain stick figures have any right to be. It belongs to a very specific moment in browser gaming, when a single animator could put out something this polished for free and reach an enormous audience. Interest in the series never really faded either: the Flash originals were later re-animated and gathered into a paid collection for modern platforms, which introduced the heist to players who had never touched a Flash portal.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is there a way to lose permanently? No. Every failed choice rewinds automatically and disables that option so you can pick again. You cannot get stuck.

How many endings does the heist have? More than one. Different approaches through the museum lead to different conclusions, so a second and third playthrough are worth doing.

Do I need to have played the earlier Henry Stickmin games? No. The museum job is self-contained, and the running gags land fine without prior context.

How long does one playthrough take? A few minutes if you head straight for the correct choices, considerably longer if you do the sensible thing and trigger every failure first.

Is the Flash version the same as the one sold on Steam? Not quite. The later collection re-drew and re-animated the original games and added material, but the heist you play here is the original browser release.