The Stanley Parable

The Stanley Parable is many things all at once, and all of them are clever and fun. It’s a story made of stories, an exploration of the limits of freedom in gaming, a battle between narrator and narrated, and a giant self-referential meta feedback loop. It encourages exploration by rewarding you with entirely new game paths leading to wildly differing ends, and Stanley even manages to survive a few of them.

Many of the environments are bland, but deliberately so; delightful hidden details show their faces everywhere if you're willing to look, however. By turns hilarious, disturbing, witty and poignant, The Stanley Parable is a successful experiment in the video game medium's inherent interactivity and how this can affect an author's story -- for good and for ill.

There are pacing issues, but they're inherent to the illusory freedom. The more subtle endings can fall flat if experienced directly after the most shocking and bizarre. More ironically, this game about game endings doesn't have one of its own. Having run through my internal checklist of possible paths, I'm now left poking around for possible secrets. And so The Stanley Parable ends on a whimper, but to have it any other way would spoil the frequent bangs along the way.