Fleeing the Complex is the fifth and final installment in the Henry Stickmin series created by PuffballsUnited, originally released as a Flash game on Newgrounds before being fully remastered and expanded as part of The Henry Stickmin Collection on Steam, and it represents the most ambitious and narratively consequential entry in the franchise up to that point, raising the stakes of Henry’s story in ways that would set the stage for the series finale that followed. The game follows Henry Stickmin, the series’ lovably incompetent yet endlessly resourceful protagonist, as he attempts to escape from The Wall, a massive maximum-security prison complex built into the side of a cliff in a remote and desolate location, after being captured and transported there following the events of the previous installment. Like every entry in the Henry Stickmin series, Fleeing the Complex is structured as an interactive cartoon rather than a traditional game, presenting players with a series of choice points where they must select from a list of options to determine how Henry attempts to proceed, with the vast majority of wrong choices resulting in elaborately animated failure sequences that are frequently funnier and more creative than the correct path forward, rewarding players who deliberately pick the wrong answer just to see what absurd consequence unfolds. The game is particularly notable within the series for featuring multiple distinct escape routes that lead to genuinely different endings, each of which carries real narrative weight and has direct implications for the overarching Henry Stickmin story, with some endings placing Henry in radically different circumstances and allegiances that become important context when playing through the series finale.
This branching structure gives Fleeing the Complex a replay value that earlier entries lacked, as players are encouraged to work through every available path rather than simply finding the single correct route to the credits, and the diverging storylines make the game feel genuinely expansive despite its browser-game origins. One of the most celebrated aspects of the game is its introduction of Ellie Rose, a fellow prisoner who becomes Henry’s companion and co-conspirator on certain escape routes and who immediately became one of the most popular characters in the entire franchise upon the game’s release, with her quick wit, competence, and entertaining dynamic with Henry providing some of the most memorable and funny moments in the whole series.
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The failure animations, which have always been a defining feature of the Henry Stickmin experience, reach a creative peak in this installment, packed with pop culture references spanning video games, films, television, and internet culture, and PuffballsUnited’s encyclopedic knowledge of the things his audience loves is on full display in the sheer density and variety of the gags crammed into every wrong answer. The animation quality itself was the highest PuffballsUnited had achieved at the time of the original release, with fluid and expressive character movement, dynamic action sequences, and a visual polish that gave the whole production a genuine cinematic energy that elevated it above what most people expected from a free browser game. The remastered version included in The Henry Stickmin Collection added new scenes and content, refined the visuals further, and wove the game more tightly into the series-wide narrative threads that reach their conclusion in Completing the Mission, making the remaster an essential and improved way to experience the story. Among the fan community, Fleeing the Complex is consistently ranked as one of the strongest entries in the series for its branching paths, its memorable new characters, the quality and quantity of its jokes, and the genuine narrative significance of its multiple endings, and it stands as a landmark moment in a franchise that defined interactive cartoon gaming for an entire generation of browser game enthusiasts.
