Breaking the Bank is the first installment in the Henry Stickmin series created by PuffballsUnited, originally released as a free Flash game on Newgrounds, and while it is the shortest and most rudimentary entry in the franchise by a significant margin, it holds an outsized importance as the game that introduced Henry Stickmin to the world and planted the seeds of an interactive cartoon format that would evolve and grow across four more games and eventually culminate in a full commercial release on Steam. The game follows Henry Stickmin, a stick figure with no particular skills and an apparent compulsion toward criminal activity, as he attempts to rob a bank by any means necessary, arriving at the scene with a briefcase and a head full of bad ideas and proceeding to demonstrate just how spectacularly wrong a simple heist can go when every decision made along the way is the wrong one. The gameplay is about as stripped down as an interactive experience can get, presenting the player with a single choice at a time and offering a small selection of items or actions to attempt, with each option either advancing Henry toward his goal or triggering one of the game’s animated failure sequences that depict the chaotic and often fatal consequences of his poor judgment.
These failure animations are the true attraction of Breaking the Bank, as they were for every game that followed it, and even in this earliest and most basic form the format demonstrates an immediate and infectious appeal, with PuffballsUnited finding exactly the right tone of deadpan absurdism that would define the series going forward. The references packed into the failure gags are drawn from video games, action movies, and internet culture in a way that spoke directly to the Newgrounds audience of the mid-2000s, and the sheer enthusiasm and creativity with which PuffballsUnited approached each wrong-answer animation made it clear from the very beginning that failing was going to be just as much fun as succeeding, if not more so. Breaking the Bank is extremely short even by the modest standards of Flash games from that era, with a single correct path through the game that can be completed in just a few minutes, and the total runtime including all of the failure animations is still brief enough to experience in its entirety within a single sitting without any sense of overstaying its welcome.
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The animation quality is noticeably rougher than anything PuffballsUnited would produce later in the series, reflecting the humble origins of a project that began as a relatively simple creative exercise rather than a planned franchise, but there is a charm and energy to the early visual style that feels appropriate for the lo-fi, anything-goes spirit of Newgrounds during that period. The game has only one ending, in contrast to the multiple branching routes that later entries would introduce, which gives it a more linear and less replayable structure, though the failure animations provide enough variety to justify multiple attempts for players who want to see every wrong answer play out. In the context of the broader Henry Stickmin series, Breaking the Bank functions primarily as a historical artifact and a point of origin, important less for what it achieves on its own terms and more for what it set in motion, establishing the character, the format, and the comedic sensibility that PuffballsUnited would spend years refining and expanding into something far more ambitious and accomplished. The remastered version in The Henry Stickmin Collection gave it a visual refresh and added new content while preserving its original brevity and spirit, ensuring that the beginning of Henry’s story remains accessible and entertaining as the starting point of one of browser gaming’s most beloved franchises.
