xesite/blog/stanley-parable.markdown

---
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.