The Stanley Parable

GAME ON

By Jennifer Harrison

My opinions on computer gaming and some of my favorite games. Playing games on the home computer since the days of the trash 80. I love indie, open-world, unique, puzzle, and resource games. The cake is a lie.

The Stanley Parable

Choose your own ending

The Stanley Parable isn't really a game, not as people normally define such things. It's more a series of endings. If you allow the narrator to guide you, you end up with a nicely packaged ending. If you're like me, you'll do the exact opposite of what the narrator tells you, while he becomes increasingly petulant, insulting and threatening. Then he gets tired of your shenanigans and resets your game.

The Stanley Parable is best described as a playable narrative - the computer equivalent of Choose Your Own Adventure. The puzzle in this game is to find all the possible endings. I've counted about twelve possible endings, and four unforced endings (where you can leave and continue playing). Fortunately, if you have no patience (like me) to try every single option, there are user-generated guides to get to some of the endings.

The game starts with Stanley, our main character, sitting in front of a dismal terminal in a room by himself. A narrator speaks.

 "This is a story of a man, named Stanley. Stanley worked for a company in a big building where he was Employee 427. Employee 427's job was simple. He sat at his desk and pushed buttons on a keyboard. Orders came through a monitor on his desk, telling him which buttons to push, how long to push them, and in which order. This was what Employee 427 did every day, every month of every year, and while others would have considered it soul-rending, Stanley relished every order that came in, as if he had been made for this job. And Stanley was happy.

And then one day, something peculiar happened. Something that would forever change Stanley, something which he could never quite forget. He had been at his desk for nearly an hour before he realized that not one single order had arrived on the monitor for him to follow. No one had showed up to give him instructions, or even say "Hi." Never in all his years at the company had this happened, this complete isolation. Something had clearly gone wrong. Shocked, frozen solid, Stanley found himself unable to move for the longest time. But he gathered his wits and regained his senses and stepped out of his office.

This is where things get weird. You can turn around and shut the door (The Coward ending). The narrator responds with          "Stanley simply couldn't handle the pressure." What if he had to make a decision? What if a crucial outcome fell under his responsibility? He had never been trained for that. No, the only way this could go was badly. Eventually, the narrator resets the game and you're back in your office, at the terminal.

Or you can go out and try various doors to see if they open. Each action you take changes your ending just a bit. Go through the doors to the office, then take the stairs down, and you have an identity crisis. Or continue doing the exact opposite of what the narrator tells you, and he gets frustrated and puts you in Minecraft, instead. When you have too much fun exploring the open world of Minecraft, the narrator decides to put you in a mockup of Portal, instead. Finally, he gets disgusted and tosses you into what looks like Half-Life's sub-basement (The Developer's ending).

One path will take you to a museum of how they developed the game. Another (known as the Broom Closet ending) is triggered by you going into the broom closet and just standing there. The narrator gets increasingly frustrated with you continuing to stand in the broom closet, despite the fact that there's nothing to do in there, and will eventually announce that you must have died at your keyboard, because nobody would stand in a broom closet for no reason. Some are actually depressing. In one, Stanley goes crazy and throws himself out of a window. Another traps you above the virtual space, forever invisible.

It's a very simple game. You won't do any jumping, there's limited clicking, and the challenge in this case is just to find all the possible endings.

Davey Wreden conceived of the game while he was in college. "The very first thing I asked with the game was 'what would happen if you could disobey the narrator?'" Wreden originally released this as a free modification for Half-Life 2, and it uses many of the same skins. After it started to be successful, he rewrote the game using Source and released it as a standalone game. Wreden hired British actor Kevan Brighting as the voice of the narrator.

The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe came out in 2022, and I've been trying very hard not to purchase it. I already have too many games that I'm not playing right now, I don't need to add another one. But Ultra Deluxe has an "expanded reimagining" of the original story. All the original endings are there, but there are more added, and the office machines have been updated to look more modern. Maybe I'll wait until it goes on sale.