Henry Stickmin, created by InnerSloth LLC, is a weird series. The series consists of choose your own adventure style games which evolved and expanded overtime from one solution in the first game, to multiple branching paths, each with their own unique endings, and the latest installment, completing the mission, relies on the endings from the last two games in the series. It’s a wildly entertaining franchise despite how, at least on paper, it should not work.
Choose your own adventure games are based on the players logical deductions on what choice should be the correct one in a given situation. Yet in Henry Stickmin, there’s very little, if at all, logic to be found. I’d even go as far to say that a “perfect run” of any Henry Stickmin game is completely impossible without a string of insanely lucky guessesHenry will spawn various tools from nowhere, and display cartoon anatomy one moment and realistic physics the next. No solution is clear cut, as anything can happen with any solution, which does away with the logic that these games should have. So logically these games should not work, but they do, and I until recently I couldn’t precisely explain why
It was when I watched Masahiro Sakurai’s video about how randomness can spice up a games design where it finally all clicked for me. Henry Stickmin makes no sense, and that’s precisely why it works
So for starters, in the video, Masahiro Sakurai stated that games are essentially about repeating the same content over and over again, and that random elements can prevent players from getting bored which is especially true for Henry Stickmin. And it’s not just because the random, unpredictable outcomes keep the game interesting, the game is also really funny. Often the outcomes are so bizarre that the player can’t help but burst out laughing, with the prime example being the famous distraction scene in Fleeing the Complex, where Henry spontaneously breaks out into dance in an attempt to distract the guards blocking his and Ellies path, but what happens instead is they all break out into the same dance, a result that even bewilders the omniscient commentator of the players failures.
Of course, Masahiro Sakurai also touches on the downsides of randomness, and that would be the nature of fairness. He essentially states that if luck becomes the determining factor in a given game scenario, that would result in the player believing the scenario to be unfair, and thus not fun. The player has to believe that they’re responsible for their own failure which is difficult to do when logic is thrown out the window, but fortunately, Henry Stickmin manages to circumvent this issue in several ways. Alongside the aforementioned comedy, the game is very forgiving, often allowing the player to immediately try again after each failure. And the failures themselves usually aren’t long, which helps the player seamlessly get back into the gameplay without feeling like they're wasting time
Overall, Henry Stickmin as a choose your own adventure game, breaks many conventions. It’s focus on comedy and efficient gameplay made its failures not only enjoyable, but desirable to the vast majority of the gaming community. It’s practically impossible to get a perfect run of Henry Stickmin, but that would also just be missing the point
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