The Stanley Parable

The Stanley Parable is very reminiscent of the choose your own adventure books I used to read as a child. You the reader are told exactly what's happening within the story till you get the choice to either ‘Save the princess’ or ‘Go home and eat Reese's Pieces’ - the reader then flips to the corresponding page and proceeds with the story. The Stanley Parable is pretty much an interactive version of that in videogame form, except you don't have any weapons or even the ability to jump The Stanley Parable might actually be the best walking simulator ever created. You literally just walk stanely around while a god like narrator ( doing there best Stephen Fry’s -Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy impersonation) tells Stanley what to do.


You play non-descript office employee #427, or Stanley. Your job is pretty much being the Irish guy from ‘Lost’ whose main purpose is to press buttons on a keyboard when prompted. Unlike the Irish guy from ‘Lost’’(pretty sure his name is Desmond, but I refuse to google it), Stanely is actually competent at his boring button pressing job and he’s actually content with it. This is until one day he notices all his co workers have disappeared. From this point the player, using the narrator’s guidance, navigates Stanely around the office. On this journey, you’ll see such amazing and magical places like the employee lounge, broom closet, the boss’s office and a mind control facility. Once you’ve helped Stanley achieve his freedom or death the game will restart and you get to do it all over again.Personal I enjoy a game leaves me with deep philosophical questions that go unanswered as long as the journey is weird, dark, and occasionally nonsensical.Your own conclusion is bound to be very different from mine – and that's something we should all celebrate.This might sound like the game could suffer from being repetitive. 

 I had a couple of instances where I chosen the same path as before hoping for a different result only to come to the same conclusion. That’s the moment, for me at least, where I started to take larger deviations from the narrator’s neatly laid out path. At one point I just made Stanley stand in the broom closet for around 5 minutes. When the narrator got annoyed, I made Stanley stay for another 5 minutes to deliberately defy the narrator as he implores you to get back on track. You can't help but notice that, as the narrator angrily addresses Stanley, he's actually talking to you.


After a few play through s you start to ponder what the game is. Is it a an incredibly open-ended sandbox game or an incredibly linear puzzle game. After a few hours of playing it I started to feel like I was stuck in an existential horror story. I then proceed to turn the game off and go for a walk while eating some Reese's Pieces and, sadly, failing to find any princesses that needed saving. This is when I realized that The Stanley Parable is more of a player conducted experiment. The game set out to discover what kind of player you are- Do you want to break stuff ? Do you want to be told what to do? Do you hate being told what to do? Do you just want Stanley to be happy? Or do you want to rule the world?

4 and half out of 5 occasionally nonsensical waffles.