Name: The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe; Target Audience: Ages 10+ but intended for mature audiences that understand its tropes, singleplayer; Creators: Davey Wreden and William Pugh, published by Crows Crows Crows; Platform: Steam (PC/Mac), Nintendo Switch, PS4/PS5, Xbox One/Series X|S.
For this week’s Critical Play, I decided to play The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe (TSPUD). TSPUD has been on my radar for quite some time since it released in 2013 at the height of some of my favorite YouTubers’ careers (shoutout Markiplier). I had never gotten around to playing it myself since I figured I had seen everything there was to see in the game, but through this Critical Play I realized that there’s much more depth to explore in this game, especially from a designer’s point of view.
TSPUD is certainly a prime example of an embedded narrative, as the narrator gives you bits of information during each playthrough along with environmental storytelling that explains Stanley’s situation, as unreliable as this information may be. However, through repeatedly playing the game to explore its wildly branching paths, there exists an emergent meta narrative of the relationship between the player, the narrator, and Stanley.
For some context, TSPUD is a walking simulator in which you can only make one choice: walking. As the game begins, you are told you’re a person named Stanley who works at a nondescript office performing menial tasks day in and day out. You are told that Stanley finds joy in this menial labor, but when all of a sudden Stanley stops receiving tasks, he steps out of his office to investigate why this happened as directed by the narrator (Fig. 1). As the game progresses, the player moves Stanley around his office space, investigating different spaces within the labyrinthine office and learning more about why Stanley’s coworkers disappeared (Fig. 2). From the outset we see this evidence of embedded narratives, as the narrator elaborates on Stanley’s motivations, relationships, and the history behind the office he finds himself in as the player commands Stanley to walk around the office.
As the player makes decisions for Stanley throughout the course of the game, the narrator comments on the player’s choices and will often mock them for making decisions the narrator deems as “incorrect.” For example, at the very beginning of the game there, the player is given the choice to move Stanley through a set of doors. The narrator says, “[Stanley] entered the door on his left” (Fig. 3). However, if the player instead moves Stanley through the door on the right, the narrator mocks Stanley for being unbothered by the disappearance of his coworkers and sarcastically commenting on how “worth it” it was to go through the door on the right before entering the door on the left (Fig. 4, Fig. 5). Again, we observe an embedded narrative through being told what we’re doing is wrong — by walking in the wrong direction (performing an incorrect action), the player can surmise aspects of the story if they had performed the correct action through inference and through explicit (often mocking) comments from the narrator (Fig. 6).
Despite this emphasis on embedded narratives within TSPUD, there is an interesting emergent narrative that develops throughout one’s playthough. While playing, one will notice that there are no saves or checkpoints in TSPUD — if you’re playing and you decide to stop playing wihtout reaching an ending, the game will simply put you back in your chair at the very beginning of the game as if nothing had happened. I noticed this on my first playthrough as I walked through a window and fell outside of the office (Fig. 7). Once you fall outside of the office, the narrator goes on a long tangent about narrative in games and how he does such an excellent job in showing us the futility of trying to escape the narrative the game has prescribed for Stanley and the player (Fig. 8). This highlights the only other true choice the player has besides walking — resetting the game. Combined with the choices made by walking, the player can create an emergent meta narrative around what decisions they make for Stanley by walking and when they decide to reset the game if they dislike the direction in which one of TSPUD’s many branching paths takes them.
These elements all converged through the ending I discovered while playing through the game. By repeatedly ignoring the narrator’s wishes and walking in the direction opposite his narration at every step, we eventually find ourselves in a derelict version of the office in which the narrator berates us for choosing incorrectly and ruining his story (Fig. 9). This ending culminates in the narrator resetting the game himself and removing control from the player of Stanley, as the player observes him from above through the ceiling (Fig. 10). However, since the player is no longer in control of Stanley, Stanley simply stands in front of the doors, refusing to make a decision while the narrator becomes increasingly distressed by his refusal to move (Fig. 11). There is no satisfaction to this ending — the player is left unsatisfied as they can no longer walk and interact with the game, and the narrator is left unsatisfied with a Stanley that has no interest in engaging with whatever story he had prepared. This unsatisfaction exemplifies the tension between the narrator and player throughout the game, emphasizing the broader metanarrative the player creates for themselves by resetting the game after arriving at this ending.
TSPUD doesn’t allow many opportunities for violence, but occasionally there are violent acts one can take. No violence is ever taken by the player against other individuals, as there are no other individuals in the game, but there was one time in which I threw Stanley off a moving platform and plummeted him to his death. The narrator did not enjoy this and berated the player for beleiving they had agency in the story and simply plopped Stanley back at the beginning of the game. This disincentivized me to continue exploring with different methods of killing Stanley, as I wasn’t interested in playing the game for 15 minutes just to be mocked by the narrator and be placed at the beginning again. In this way, TSPUD comments on the futility of violence within the bounds of the game, especially towards oneself.
