Henchman Story excels as a superhero visual novel exactly where it commits hardest to its own joke, putting you inside the head of the guy who’s supposed to lose. Going in, the pitch alone raised an obvious question for me: could a game built entirely around a background extra actually sustain real stakes across eleven different endings and around fifteen hours of story? The developer set its sights on exactly that problem with its first major project, and there’s no denying it commits to the bit with more branching consequence than the premise strictly required.
Stan works as a henchman for the bumbling supervillain Lord Bedlam, a job he fell into after struggling to make a living elsewhere. It’s thankless work: cheap spandex, late hours, and the near guarantee of getting knocked around by superheroes who are stronger, faster, and dressed a lot better than he is. Worst of all, his boss barely remembers his name, misfiling it within two sentences of any proper introduction, which is exactly why Lord Bedlam assigns his henchmen numbers instead. Stan starts to realize, slowly, that even the smallest choices made by the lowest person on a supervillain’s payroll can end up mattering more than anyone expected.
Kate, a rookie henchman fresh enough to need mentoring, gives Stan someone even lower on the totem pole to look out for, while Dave, his direct supervisor, brings an overzealous energy that turns routine assignments into small chaos. Madame Scorpion sits above both of them, a supervillain in her own right in a black and red spy catsuit, wielding a red energy sword and treating most low-level henchmen as disposable tools until one of them actually earns her respect. On the hero side, Miss Dynamo rushes headlong into danger without much forethought, playing off the more strategic, level-headed Shining Nova in a classic hot-and-cold team dynamic. Being treated as expendable by nearly everyone above him on this particular food chain sets the terms for everything else. It’s exactly why the small moments where someone actually notices Stan, Kate leaning on him, Dave grudgingly respecting him, Madame Scorpion warming up to him, carry real emotional weight they wouldn’t have in a story centered on someone with actual power.
That weight isn’t just window dressing, either. A Relationship Values system tracks how everyone around Stan actually feels about him based on the choices you make, and that tracking directly determines which of the eleven endings the story lands on. Full hero and full villain paths both exist, alongside a pair of Road Untaken endings where Stan opts out of the entire conflict rather than picking a side. How he treats Dave or the hideout’s chef carries consequences that echo forward into later choices instead of sitting in isolation, which is a level of follow-through this kind of comic-relief premise had no obligation to deliver.
Familiar superhero archetypes, the aloof villain, the overzealous supervisor, the sultry rival supervillain, all get room to twist into something more specific than their surface impression suggests once the branching structure has space to develop them. Madame Scorpion in particular reveals a loyalty toward henchmen who’ve actually earned it that her introduction never prepares you for. One real limitation is worth naming directly, though: every romance option in the game is heterosexual, with no same-sex options anywhere in the story. It doesn’t undercut the writing surrounding those relationships so much as it narrows who gets to see themselves in Stan’s choices at all.
That worm’s-eye premise gets a comic book aesthetic to match, colorful and hand drawn, with character portraits built from a rotation of static poses and expression changes tied to dialogue rather than full animation. It’s a presentation style that sells the genre it’s parodying without needing a bigger budget to do it. That same commitment shows up in the voice work, funded by the Kickstarter campaign that got Henchman Story made in the first place. Developer Silken Sail Entertainment cleared its 15,000 dollar Kickstarter target back in 2020, closing near 18,600 dollars, enough to bring in a full cast rather than leaving Stan’s world silent.
Lord Bedlam’s deadpan delivery specifically carries jokes that could easily have fallen flat on the page alone, the kind of performance that makes a line land purely on timing. Writer Marc Soskin, who also worked on The Outer Worlds, built a script clearly designed with that timing in mind from the start.
One platform-specific detail is worth knowing before you buy: the PC release supports 30 manual save slots plus multiple autosaves, while the Xbox port is limited to just 9 save slots with no autosave support at all. It’s a real shortfall the developer has acknowledged, and one that matters more than usual in a branching story built around choices that echo forward for hours.
Verdict
Henchman Story earns its laughs by committing fully to the worm’s-eye view of a genre that almost never bothers looking down, giving Stan real stakes in choices that would be background noise in any other superhero story. The lack of same-sex romance options is worth knowing about going in, but the Relationship Values system, eleven distinct endings, and a cast that consistently outgrows its own archetypes make this one of the more distinctive comedic visual novels in its genre.
