For this Critical Play, I played the Stanley Parable. I actually really enjoyed the chance to play it again, because I got to play the Ultra Deluxe edition released two years back with new content!
What a terrific, all time classic game! To answer the guiding question off the bat – unlike many walking sims, which are frequently linear, 3D games where you traverse a beautiful environment, in the Stanley Parable you traverse a strange, unending office, underneath the guidance of a narrator. The way that walking tells the story, is that walking is the story! The game has dozens of different endings based off of which directions you chose to walk in. There is a constant voice of narration over every action you take, guiding the player in a second person style as to what they should do. E.g., “Stanley walked through the right door” when you are faced with a door to the left and door to the right. You can choose to obey, or choose to go your own way. The narrator is rich, condescending, impressive, and absolutely brilliantly written. It’s a true exploration into the way of player agency
The mechanics are relatively simple but profound in their implications. The core mechanics are just making choices at designated junctures—which path to take, whether to follow or defy the narrator’s instructions. The game also has some environmental interaction, where players can interact with certain objects or elements within the game world, albeit in a very limited fashion and only at specific points.
The dynamics of “The Stanley Parable” arise from the interplay between the player’s choices and the narrator’s responses. Each choice leads to a new branch in the narrative, a wide branching web of outcomes and experiences. The game dynamically reacts not only to the choices but to the context in which choices are repeated or avoided, commenting on the nature of choice and consequence. Repeatedly defying the narrator can lead to entirely different narrative outcomes, some of which directly address the player as some type of bizarre specimen.
Aesthetic wise, the strongest aesthetic in the game is the narrative. The unfolding story adapting to the player’s decisions. The interaction with the narrator, who is both guide and antagonist, creates a complex narrative layer. Discovery is the second driving aesthetic. There is a motivation to explore different choices to uncover all possible endings and narrative arcs. Through this process, the game provides rich commentary on life, free will, predestination, and video games as whole.
“but they didn’t understand the game was never meant to be funny! It was meant to have a point! It was meant to speak to the human condition! “But where are the jokes? Where are the jokes?” they bemoaned, they screamed. They gnashed their teeth and said “Entertain us!” It wasn’t enough. They had to leave a pathetic little thumbs-down review and make all of their pitiful demands.”
It occasionally brushes a bit with horror. Like the ending to the Skip Button sequence, where in response to the negative steam review, the narrator gives the player a skip button. But the button keeps skipping longer and longer passages of time, starting with minutes, to hours, to weeks, to months, to years, to centuries. The narrator keeps begging Stanley to not hit the button, as he is trapped alone in the room conscious for all that time, but unlike most of the game which gives you so much choice… there’s no option but to keep pressing after a certain point. The door is gone. The narrator loses sanity, regains it, then loses it again, through skip after skip, until eventually the office has turned to sand, and the game ends with the player walking out towards the desert sun.
I’ll close with one of my favorite segments in the entire game, during the second skip out of the 18-19 or so in the skip button sequence.
“Okay, so my theory is that any choice you’ve ever made is simply a series of choices made by the person who you are, or were, or will be at the time of having made said choice.
That is to say, if by articulating a choice you’ve already made, you bring that choice into being, then by making no choice and saying nothing, are you not simply erecting in the sanctuary of time a monument to every person you’ve ever been, making every choice to which you’ve ever given your great gift of mortal and yet timeless thought?
Or rather, do all of the choices you’ve ever made in fact make you more not this kind of person, and in fact do the very opposite? You see, it could in fact be both of these things at once. That you are both making choices and not making choices, and that they are both affecting you and not affecting you at the same time, by virtue of the fact that you both are and are not making them.”
