This is the story of a streamer named Brandon. Brandon was a curious sort, streaming games to a limited audience consisting mostly of his close friends. And one day, when he had already decided to stream more Crystalline Conflict from Final Fantasy XIV, Brandon noticed that The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe had been released on the same day.
Though it concerned him that he had started writing about himself in the third person, Brandon knew that was just the effect that The Stanley Parable has on people who play it.
The Stanley Parable has been, and always will be, almost mandatory reading for anyone who dips their toes in the sphere of games criticism. Even today, nine years later, there are so few other games around that tackle the concept of choice and consequence so directly, interrogating the tension that exists between the player and the game itself.
It is often said that video games are, at their core, a conversation between the player and the designer, and Stanley Parable literalizes this concept to its most logical extreme, with a narrator taking the role of an overbearing designer who can’t stand that the player might not always agree with the direction he wants to take the story. And we can go along with him, or try to poke holes to see what we might be able to get away with.
And this premise lends itself very well to remakes and revisions, probably until the end of time. I played The Stanley Parable back when it was just a Half-Life 2 mod, a few years before it became its own game, and seeing how far it’s come since those days is something to behold. May it continue as one of the coolest living documents in video game history.
Leave a Reply