While this review might specifically be about Escaping the Prison, you could substitute this for any of the other Henry Stickmin games from this point up to Infiltrating the Airship with minimal changes in my overall opinion. The Henry Stickmin series realises that another potential avenue to be quite a good flash game is to double down on the humour that one can pack into a game. The format of a flash game also works exceptionally well for these primarily comedic experiences due to the games not being long enough for the humour to start dragging, keeping them fresh throughout their short runtime and allowing for fast, snappy writing that doesn’t really sit still without fear of giving the player fatigue.

The humour in the game is really what makes this so great as well, somehow even managing to make pop culture references genuinely hilarious, which is a rare feat for sure. When your choice based game is making the player want to find every possible way to fail just to find another joke to laugh at, you know that you've done something right in the writing department. It's the absurdity of the situations at hand as well that contribute so strongly to this constant drive to find all failures, with the rules of the world often feeling like they change at the drop of a hat just to be able to throw in another piece of comical absurdity. I'll give this game a somewhat middling score just because it is quite short and doesn't go quite as far as some of the later games in the series would go, along with not giving the player the opportunity to jump back to a specific choice easily, but it's certainly quite an entertaining experience nonetheless.

I'm honestly surprised how well this game as held up over the years. It's such an improvement over Breaking the Bank in every sense. It went from 5 fails in the last game to 18 fails in this one and there's and all the fails are really entertaining and charming and I think the overall short nature of this game really helps the comedy because nothing ever feels overly drawn out. I appreciate the deviations in the gameplay style lot whether it be the subtle like the you choosing the direction you go in the air duct or the obvious like the quick time events and the big Phoenix Wright homage portion. And speaking of that, I really appreciate the game going out of it's way for the Phoenix Wright portion feel distinct from the rest of the game and feels like PuffballsUnlimited really was a fan of that series (also it kinda helps that I just started playing through the second game currently). And in general the game made it's pop culture references feel very natural and never did it feel in your face. It does have it's shortcomings, though. Like, for starters, the voice acting. It's all done by Puffballs himself and while I do respect how he this all on his own, the majority of the character voices sound very similar to each other and does get a bit distracting and repetitive. But I will give this game the benefit of the doubt that this is the first game in the franchise to rely on dialogue more heavily and it would only make sense that the voice acting would sound samey and amateurish because this is pretty much PuffballUnited's first real venture into voice roll. And one more nitpick is that there's no chart or anything to back to certain points in the game without going back right to the start and watching the same cutscenes over and over again. So yeah, it's a fun and charming little game that expands the original game, but it does suffer a little from lack of experience in certain portions of the experience, but in the end it's pretty easy to understand why it was like this in the first place. But I can't wait to play the next few games to see how far this dude has come over the years.

Note: I played the original Newgrounds release and yes, I did get all the achievements