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This is a review about a game featuring a man named Stanley. He worked in an office in a menial job where he did pointless busywork, until one day everyone disappeared and a narrator started dictating his every move. Sometimes Stanley worked with the narrator to move the story forward, and sometimes he went off and did whatever he pleased while the narrator got increasingly frustrated. Every ending, no matter how strange, sad, uplifting, bitter, or inexplicable led to a new beginning, where Stanley would once again set out from his office in an endless back-and-forth struggle with the narrator for some measure of control. Stanley screwed with the narrator, the narrator screwed with Stanley, and on rare occasions they’d walk the path of the story together as a team. Stanley’s life was very strange.The Stanley Parable is a study in freedom in gaming, in which the whole point is to test the limits of the narrative to see just how big the box you’ve got to play in actually is. Escher woodcut it’s constantly trying to make you understand its illusions by playing with them in near-endless new ways.
While Escher wanted the viewer to understand it’s all just flat lines on paper no matter how 3D it looks, The Stanley Parable is endless choices that only appear to give the player all sorts of fun ways to make the narrative fly off the rails.As artsy as the game may be when you think about it, The Stanley Parable still manages to be, most of all, a lot of fun to experience. There’s humor to be found from the very start as you snag the first achievement, and the game pokes fun at everything from story structure and narrative conventions to gaming tropes that are so ingrained you might not even notice them any more. The writing is smart and the narration is excellent, so much so that I usually found myself stopping any time the narrator had something to say just to make sure I didn’t miss anything.
The theme of freedom as presented in a medium that only offers the illusion of freedom may sound pretentious, but the presentation is anything but that. If there’s one problem with The Stanley Parable it’s that it’s hard to talk about without spoiling. The game is a first-person narrative with limited interactivity, so the value of the experience is in discovery and experimentation. It’s hard to be delighted about discovering the narrator got so annoyed with your screwing around that he boarded up a room so you couldn’t go in there any more if someone’s already pointed you in the right direction.
There are huge, deep mysteries and hidden side-stories to pursue in The Stanley Parable, a couple of which will probably require an FAQ to figure out, but the fun of the game is following the story down all its dozens of branching paths and seeing what new situation you end up in. Discovering the narrator’s reactions as he tries to get you back on the path, gets annoyed as you don’t do what you should, gives up completely and just starts winging it, despairs, gets angry, or sometimes even kills you in frustration is also good fun, and is frequently a worthy reward for doing strange things.Closing Comments:The Stanley Parable is many things all at once, and all of them are clever and fun. It’s a story made of stories, an exploration of the limits of freedom in gaming, a battle between narrator and narrated, and a giant self-referential meta feedback loop. It encourages exploration by rewarding you with entirely new game paths leading to wildly differing ends, and Stanley even manages to survive a few of them. They all end up back at the office for another journey down its hallways to a new branching point, of course, but each new journey reveals a possibility to experiment with another possible divergence. Or maybe just trying something silly like pursuing the “5 clicks on door 430” achievement.
Whatever you try, the odds are good The Stanley Parable will recognize it with some type of commentary, and when the writing is this good and the world this clever, that’s a reward worth chasing.Platform: PC.
The Stanley Parable is an interactive narrative game intended to parody video game tropes and poke fun at gameplay elements that are designed to limit the player’s options, so they fit into a linear, overarching story. Upon an early impression, I would point out how limited the controls are since you can only walk around with no way to jump. Oct 17, 2013 The Stanley Parable is an experimental narrative-driven first person game. It is an exploration of choice, freedom, storytelling and reality, all examined through the.
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Stanley sits at his computer, just like every other day of his miserable life. He spends hours staring at the screen and pushing the buttons he is told to. But today is different. Today you are in control. Today you are Stanley.When he receives no work, Stanley leaves his desk to find the office empty.
No worries, his colleagues are probably just in the meeting room. So Stanley heads out to find them. Maybe he’ll just stay in his room and hope they come back. Maybe he’ll go on an adventure to uncover the true meaning of his life. The decision is entirely up to you.The Stanley Parable is unlike any game I’ve ever played.
There are no puzzles. There are no enemies. You have only to move, listen, and occasionally click. And yet somehow it’s really enjoyable. The building may be abandoned, but you are not alone. Your companion is the beautiful, deeply British voice of Kevan Brighting.
His narration is perfect for breaking the fourth wall (and in some cases just breaking down) to tell us what to do, and to scold us if we don’t do it. The narration completely makes the game. When you arrive at a set of two doors he says, “Stanley takes the door on his left.” This is a test of your freedom of choice; in fact, you don’t even have to go into that room. If you take the door on the left, the narrator carries on as normal. If you take the door on the right and continue ignoring him, he scoffs. “Stanley was so bad at following directions it’s amazing he wasn’t fired years ago.”The plot is formed entirely around your choices.
There are various paths to choose from: some are intense and force you to think, whilst others are downright trippy and the rest are simply hilarious. The monotonous corridors lure you into a false sense of boredom, so when something interesting happens it takes you completely by surprise.There are 19 possible endings in the game. Most took me approximately 20 minutes to accomplish, yet somehow I racked up three hours of gameplay. Many of these endings can be achieved via multiple pathways.
I won’t ruin too many, but my favourite was the broom closet ending, where if you ignored the narration and stood in the broom closet, the narrator would give up. On your third playthrough of broom closeting, you’d find the door had been boarded up, preventing your access. This is one of few games I’ve played that regularly had me amazed or in stitches. It’s a light-hearted, easy-going game with a few hidden surprises and guest appearances from other well-known games. However, there are some powerful messages layered beneath all that coding. Without delving too deep into the workings of the world, The Stanley Parable is a good metaphor for life.
At each moment in time we have a choice, whether it be outlandish and crazy, or mundane and orderly. Mostly we follow the rules and do as we’re told, but we often wonder what would have happened if we hadn’t.(If the philosophy gets too much for you, you can always make Stanley jump out of a window. That should end it all shouldn’t it?)The Stanley Parable blows the restrictions of the player’s world wide open and lets you replay Stanley’s life to discover the unknown. Once you finish one plot, you are taken back to the beginning to make another. Even the slightest change can cause a butterfly effect. Constantly starting again does become a little tedious, but it’s a short game, and one minor flaw is forgivable.Overall The Stanley Parable is a thought provoking and hilarious game of consequence and intrigue.
It plays with your mind, surprises you at every turn, and makes you want to play it over and over again. You may think repeatedly walking down corridors doesn’t sound like much fun, but you have never been more wrong.The Stanley Parable is available on PC.
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