REVIEW: The Stanley Parable - It's clever because you're stupid...

So, The Stanley Parable is clever or rather the developer's -Galactic Cafe- are. It has received considerable notoriety since the trailer appeared on steam, and has apparently shifted well over 100K copies, this is where the real genius of  The Stanley Parable begins...




The back story is, one day the eponymous 'hero' or employee number 427 who spends his day pushing buttons to place orders given to him by his computer stops getting the orders. After a while he decided to investigate and finds the rest of the employees gone and begins to investigate.

The first few times round little details like these slides are amusing. A bit.

Sounds ironically amusing so far right? Well believe me it begins to grate from here on as the jibes are subtly reflected directly to the player.

After playing for a few hours the best way to describe it is - the gaming version of Scientology in ground-hog day. I'm not even sure it's technically a game, you spend your timing walking round pushing buttons while the narrator tells you about Stanley who spend his life pushing buttons....

Subtle.

Wait is this game mocking me? Both in function and content? Yes, yes it is! The development costs must have been minimal given the fact that most the time you spend playing getting mocked by TSP you're in exactly the same few rooms. Admittedly the dialogue changes sometimes to a varying degree but that's pretty much it on the exploration front. This is illustrated openly as well - taking a route labelled 'escape' very early on means you get to a kind of credits room which is almost as large as the game itself it seems. In it it details locations and previous iterations although these also appear to be in jest, and you spend your time here wandering round unsure of what you are doing, much the the actual 'game' part.

This is a sort of credits room. Or an afterlife metaphor, I'm not sure. Either way it's dull.

Even the achievements are a cutting critique, you turn on the achievements on the options which actually gives you the first achievement. The rest are equally satirical including one for trying to jump, for making a second return to the game, for playing all day on a Tuesday and the final one being an apparently unachievable achievement. Hilarious.

This will teach you, you award whores!

You see the real true genius of TSP, other than the fact you paid for it and it makes fun of you for it is that you keep playing it hoping to find something, well more I think. Some confirmation of the fact that you didn't buy TSP, do all that walking about pressing a button here and there to no avail. Later the game will flat out ask how many times you will repeat the same part in the vain attempt to discover something. Completing TSP is easy, in fact there's an achievement for doing it under 4mins22 you just have to do exactly as your told by the narrator which is obviously instinctive for most. I however rebelled from the off so it was a while longer and in my need to grasp at what the hell was going on that I decided to do as I was told.

I imagine this as one on the few un-sarcastic moments in TSP...

This didn't clear things up straight away either as Its was with some puzzlement I received my  'Completed the Game' achievement shortly after. I repeat numerous time the long walking about sections with usually the same dialogue with occasional variations, even after the narrator asked how many times how many times I would repeat it and illustrated my numerous on-coming failings in a variety of 'humorous' voice tones, which by the 3rd go have gone past tedious and become annoying.

If he'd have told us the truth we'd have told him to stick that red door up his a$$...

It was here, possibly slower that it should have the epiphany hit me that the only way to actually win at The Stanley Parable, is to stop playing it!

Maybe there was some further exploration, some hidden piece of revelation after hours and hours of repetition. There was no indication this was the case, and rather more importantly by this point I just didn't care! I strongly suspect there isn't and this is hinted at on the titles when there is computer on the desk in front you with the identical screen to yours and inside that the same and inside that..well you get the idea, off to infinity.

Built on Valves Source engine, graphically its feels like it from 1998 with warehouse locations stolen from left for dead or F.E.A.R. There was an option for AA in the graphics menu but it wouldn't work for reasons I don't understand - if it was sarcasm, I didn't get it. Sound wise everything is pretty minimal and un-inspiring, functional SFX is the most you can expect here apart from some lift muzak ode to Stanley.

I admire Galactic Cafe for what the have achieved here and even laughing in our faces about it, that doesn't make it worthwhile for your time or money. It can be  humorous and the irony is at times excellently placed but I heard that Hell is repetition and there is a lot of repetition in a lot of repetition a lot of repetition a lot of... See even that little bit was annoying.

RiKx