So you’re here to learn what the game, The Stanley Parable, is about. Well, your guess is as good as mine! No, I’m serious. Please. Tell me. What the heck is going on in this game?!? Released as a mod for Half-Life 2 in July 2011, The Stanley Parable is a narrative driven first person game developed by Galactic Cafe that is unconventional to say the least. The mod received praise for its witty and charismatic narration as well as the unique experience the story brings to the player. This bizarre mod, and soon to be game, is surreal yet beautiful and deep in it’s own strange manners, characteristics I hope to see more thoroughly developed in the full game. The mod has been described as the lovechild of Douglas Adams and Flann O’Brien, if that child were raised in a Portal-esque environment and made very little rational sense (well, I suppose a Douglas Adams and Flann O’Brien lovechild wouldn’t make much sense to begin with).
Developers Davey Wreden and William Pugh recently released a “demo” of the game ; I write demo in quotations here because it the exact opposite of what a demo is supposed to be with its lack of explanation of the game and missing indications of a coherent story line. However, the demo was intentionally created to avoid providing any logical explanation of the game but, instead, act as a stand-alone satirical work, poking fun at the game and other, traditional and mundane, demos. With that said, I highly recommend downloading the demo off of Steam, or at the least watching a playthough of it, which, despite its lack of sense, just made me want to play the game even more!
So, if you want to leave this article more perplexed than when you came in, watch a sneak-peak of the game below and don’t forget to check out the rest of The Stanley Parable‘s youtube channel for more trailers of the game (as well as a making-of video!) which will leave you with more questions than they answer!
