The Stanley Parable (#514)

Signed-off-by: Xe <me@christine.website>

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+---
+title: "The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe Review"
+date: 2022-07-25
+series: reviews
+---
+
+Every so often a game comes around that is genuinely hard to review. Especially
+when you are trying to avoid spoiling the magic of the game in that review. This
+is a game that is even harder to review than normal because it's an absolute
+philosophical document. This game absolutely riffs at the games industry super
+hard and it really shows. I'm going to try to avoid spoilers in this article,
+except for a few I made up.
+
+<xeblog-conv name="Cadey" mood="coffee">I was going to include screenshots in
+this article, but it's difficult for me to get them without spoiling the subtle
+comedy at hand, so I'm going to leave this as a text-only review.</xeblog-conv>
+
+The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe is either the second or third game in the
+series. At first this game was a Half Life 2 mod that came out of nowhere and
+was one of the most beloved mods ever released. Then they made it a proper game
+on the Source engine and expanded it a bit. After a while they wanted to
+continue the parable and expand it even more, but they weren't able to get it on
+consoles with it still being a Source engine game. So they ported it to Unity
+and the end result is The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe. It is one of my
+favorite games of all time.
+
+It is a deeply limited game, you only can move around and interact with things.
+The story is about an office drone named Stanley that pushes buttons based on
+instructions from his computer. The big thing that this game does though is make
+you realize the inherent paradoxes in its own design.
+
+<xeblog-conv name="Mara" mood="happy">Being limited like this is not actually a
+bad thing like the phrasing would imply. It just means that the main focus of
+the game is not on the micro actions the player can take. In this case the main
+focus is on what the player can do with the story and not what the player can do
+with their controller.</xeblog-conv>
+
+Endings that make you look like you had exercised your free will actually boil
+down to your actions being controlled by following the narrator's voices. This
+is absolutely taking the piss out of how most modern AAA game design works,
+guiding you with an invisible hand and making it _seem_ like you had the free
+will to choose what was going on when in fact you were really just following the
+invisible guidance the whole time.
+
+However I think one of the best examples of how The Stanley Parable riffs at
+mainstream game design is via the Adventure Line™️ that shows up in one branch of
+the game. The Line™️ is an obvious riff on games like Dead Space where you can
+summon a line to tell you where to go at any time. It shows how _boring_ modern
+game design is by making you _see_ the consequences of it. If you follow the
+narrator's voice, you get boring endings.
+
+In many modern AAA games, you have the free will to choose to follow the main
+story and finish all the quests or whatever, but not much else. Consider Call of
+Duty or Battlefield. You are John America and you have to kill the enemies to
+death before they kill you to death by throwing bullets at you. You get to the
+end of the level and blow up the brown people some more or something and then
+it's suddenly a victory for America. But what did you really accomplish? You
+just followed the line. Walk outside of the intended playable area? 10 second
+timer until the game kills you. Shoot a person with the wrong skin color? The
+game kills you.
+
+<xeblog-conv name="Numa" mood="delet">I used to be an adventurer like you until
+I took an arrow to the knee! Get it? It's because "taking an arrow to the knee"
+meant "getting married" because being married in Norse times (because Skyrim's
+Nord are basically LARP vikings) really handicapped your ability to move around
+freely, and in those times an arrow injury was basically guaranteed to be fatal
+so it can't be literal (if only because there's so many guards with knee
+injuries walking around effortlessly which is...unlikely at best).</xeblog-conv>
+
+However in The Stanley Parable you can defy the narrator and that's where the
+game really opens up. It's great to get in the area where the game is unfinished
+and then have the narrator complain about deadlines, scheduling delays, investor
+funding and them wanting to avoid having to stuff it to the gills with
+microtransactions. You can legitimately glitch your way out of bounds and then
+the game will reward you with a new ending you didn't know was possible. The
+game takes the concept of the illusion of free will and plays with it.
+
+The game makes you think about what games _can_ be. It makes you wonder if the
+potted plant soliloquy after the broom closet ending speaks to the mental state
+of the author more than anything. Of all of the artistic endeavors that games as
+a medium _can_ have, we end up seeing very few or none of them in mainstream
+gaming. Sure you get your occasional 4k120fps robot killer waifu with a bow and
+a whacky stick, but none of it really _revolutionizes_ video games as an art
+form. It's all just derivative of the generic "unalive bad guy and save earth"
+trope.
+
+<xeblog-conv name="Mara" mood="hacker">If you want some games that really
+revolutionize what games can be, check out
+[Celeste](https://mattmakesgames.itch.io/celeste), [Secret Little
+Haven](https://ristar.itch.io/secret-little-haven), [Baba Is
+You](https://hempuli.itch.io/baba), and [Glittermitten
+Grove](https://twinbeard.itch.io/glittermitten-grove). All of these games really
+challenge what games can be and experiment with radically different kinds of
+art. You never will see mainstream games be as risk-taking as this because art
+is fundamentally risky and capitalism wants line to go up, so they go out of
+their way to make sure that mainstream games are as safe and likely to sell many
+copies as possible.</xeblog-conv>
+
+I made up the thing about the potted plant, but if you had played the game then
+you'd probably have started the game up to look for it just to see what was
+there. I wonder if I made someone stand at that potted plant for like 5 minutes
+or something. This game sparks creativity in ways that other mainstream games
+just fundamentally don't. If you've been looking for something different in your
+video game diet, I really suggest you give it a try. Go in as blind as possible.
+I'm not paid in any way to say this, I genuinely think this is really good.