And it has a couple of stories to tell that will have you glued, skipping between genres like a Deadpool and Cable team-up. It dares to be different, taking the story of a supervillain’s lackey and stirring in some social commentary. As visual novels go, it’s substantial, and has twenty or thirty choices before you reach one of its twelve endings. It has a whiff of wish fulfilment to it.īut let’s not overdo it: Henchman Story is one of the good ones. Women seem to fall over themselves to be with him, which never quite feels authentic, and the only viable romance option talks and acts like Stan. He’s a smart ass, but smart in a slightly superior way, and wisecracking without being hugely funny. He’s clearly intended to be a cypher, a likeable chap, but we found him frequently annoying. Stan is a kind of Woody Allen mixed with Simon Pegg in Spaced: a self-effacing, nerdy guy who has a sarcastic comment for any situation. Stan and Kate, a rookie that you train up, are far more complicated, and we found ourselves gravitating towards her simply because she was three-dimensional.Ĭomedy is also famously hard to get right, and while it can work here, it often falls on its face. There’s no nuance to these characters, they’re caricatures, and it weakens the Bad Guy route in particular. ![]() Madame Scorpion is just straight-up evil. You could summarise the majority of Henchman Story’s characters with a single word. Where Henchman Story falls down, though, is in some of its characterisation and its comedy. What mask am I wearing now? Which one is more important? The irony that Stan wears so many metaphorical masks while being one of the few not to physically wear them, is not lost on us. This many masks means that the choices get loaded and complicated. He pretends to be a henchman while really being a regular Joe pretends to be evil when confronted by supervillains pretends to hero worship Lord Bedlam in front of his supervisor and pretends to be strong in front of superheroes. The secret to its sauce is that Stan wears so many masks. What we liked most about Henchman Story, outside of living the henchman dream for a bit, was how well it handles choice. There are twelve endings here, and kudos to Top Hat Studios that they can feel so wildly different. You can team-up with some superheroes to take Team Bedlam down from the inside, and the result is a little more on the tropey side as it loses the evil henchman hook, but it’s probably the more satisfying, with a more natural romance option and the chance for redemption. There are some surprisingly pertinent references to the gig economy and data-harvesting down this path (Cambridge Analytica get a kicking), and there’s even an otome-style relationship if you’re flirty enough. You can embrace the thug life, and see what it’s like to rise up the ranks of Lord Bedlam and Madame Scorpion’s (a thinly veiled Madame Hydra reference) evil organisation. ![]() There are several directions that Henchman Story could have gone with its cracking premise, and it opts for effectively two major branches. Henchman Story has fun with all of these themes, and moves nimbly from comedy to thriller to – occasionally – tragedy. That can lead to comedy, as you can laugh at the sheer absurdity of them, but it also means you can stray into other territory, as you see the collateral damage, the unsustainable lives they lead, and just how many normal people it takes to prop them up. Rather than being the superhero, like we’ve been umpteen times in other games, in Henchman Story you get to observe them from ground level. ![]() It’s a simple, familiar premise (the recent movie Free Guy did something similar with the lives of non-playable characters) but it’s fantastic grounds for a story. But it suits you to a tee, as you’re more of a career henchman: looking to survive as long as possible by running away, avoiding confrontation, and dodging promotions that would put you in harm’s way. He’s a complete buffoon, and you’re pulling off street-level crimes like stealing dog food from pet stores. You’re a low-level but long-serving henchman for Lord Bedlam (somewhere between Darth Vader and Emperor Zurg). While you don’t play Steve, in Henchman Story you play Stan, which is close enough.
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