The Stanley Parable Review

Some of these questions are most likely never answered. The fractal, labyrinthine nature of The Stanley Parable's plot makes it somewhat difficult to determine whether you've actually seen everything, which I suppose is a proper grounded review criticism of sorts. Sometimes the game merely offers you the illusion of free choice, like having three doors that all lead in the exact same direction thanks to a bit of tinkering with the laws of time and space, but finding out that it's actually an illusion and that you're not missing out on two other subplots is a task that requires you to play through the game up to that point, a somewhat tall order considering that it's more twisted and difficult to map out than a bramble hedge full of headphone cables. Nevertheless, the game's unwillingness to divulge its boundaries does lend a kind of furious motivation to replay it again and again, knowing that if you handle its many facets just right you could be sent spiralling off into the hidden depths of another tangential narrative. Sometimes it feels like the game is egging you on, taunting you with little clues that could be, for all you know, meaningless. You start anew and the floor is covered in paper, or the layout of the first few rooms has been rearranged for no adequately explained reason, or the narrator delivers a slightly naff line of exposition. It's subtle changes like this that ease the slightly-inflammatory itch caused by having to repeat the opening section more often than an amateur dramatic rehearsal, lending just enough of an air of mystery to prevent the task from sinking entirely into the realm of familiarity. Do these cues mean anything? Are you poised on the edge of another yawning chasm of secrets, or merely being toyed with?

Unlike the original mod, the game includes a save function – initially disabled until you find the toggle surreptitiously hidden away in the options menu – but I would advise against using it for immersion reasons. Part of the enjoyment gained from The Stanley Parable is the way every decision you make has a kind of permanence about it – at least within the current playthrough – and quickloading because you didn't like where your choice led just smacks of being a bad sport and tarnishes the experience, like bookmarking page 55 to see if confronting the pirate captain results in your grisly death by cutlass or not. I'm still not entirely sure I've witnessed every ending the game has to offer, despite my meticulous exploration of every possibility presented to me. Yes, I found the one you're thinking of. And that one. And probably that one too.

As a consequence of its small-scale origins, it has to be said that The Stanley Parable will not occupy your time for long. Playthroughs range from five minutes up to half an hour (there's even an achievement for speed-running the game in four minutes and twenty-two seconds, perplexingly) and depending on your willingness to dig up all the possible outcomes, your total hours spent with the game will probably amount to four or five. Honestly though, if you measure your enjoyment of a game by how much time you waste with it then you have nothing but my unconditional pity, especially if it means you'll turn your nose up at an experience as densely packed as The Stanley Parable. Not a single moment of those four or five hours is wasted. This is a game that wouldn't be caught dead using an inch of padding. It even becomes apparent, with careful analysis, that the only reason some of the sections are as long as they are is so that the narrator can finish talking before the player reaches the end of them.

Quantifying The Stanley Parable's quality was always going to be a thorny issue, largely because judging it as a game is an exercise in pointlessness. That's not to say that the things we traditionally judge games by don't matter here – I mean, I'd be hard-pressed to praise The Stanley Parable if it used Dwarf Fortress's interface or crashed every thirty seconds – but as long as they live up to a certain standard it doesn't matter, since they all just exist to serve the storytelling. It would be like rating a painting by the quality of the wall on which it is hung, or rating a book by the leather used to bind it: the works couldn't exist without these supporting elements, but they're so tangentially related that acknowledging them is scarcely worth the effort. So, consider the number at the end of this review to not represent The Stanley Parable's standing in videogames' cosmic chain of being, but rather indicate a measure of how much you need to play it. If you want to be told a branching tale without compare, if you want to see the envelope being pushed, if you want to see the conventions of videogame storytelling subverted with gleeful abandon, The Stanley Parable is for you. Is it a game? No, probably not. But it is utterly, utterly brilliant.