The Stanley Parable

I apparently live under a rock and didn’t know about the Half Life 2 Mod, The Stanley Parable, until I stumbled across them at PAX Prime 2013 this year, and immediately tried to shove my credit card in their DVD slot to give them my money. Recently green lit on Steam to be it’s own stand alone game, The Stanley Parable is an amazingly fun and simple game that tells a story with no fighting, no other characters to speak of… just Stanley in a First Person Shooter view, and a narrator telling the story as you act it out (and getting irritated at you and Stanley both when you disregard his instructions).

What I was most excited about this game is that it got me – a non FPS action player, sitting down playing an FPS story game. So here’s the gist of it; you’re Stanley, and you show up to work one day where your job is to stare at a monitor, and push the keyboard buttons that the instructions tell you to push on the monitor. Only this day, there is no one in the building. The narrators voice tells the story of how Stanley got up from his desk and went to the conference room to see if he missed a memo or something… but as the player you don’t have to go directly there. You can walk around as you please, which makes life difficult for the narrator….

What’s funny and frustrating for some, is that there are many many endings to this game, but you never ‘win’. You chose where you want to go, push what buttons you like, and eventually, you get to an ending… where you start back in Stanley’s office again. Now to be fair, the narrator is terribly funny; he gets frustrated when you don’t do what he is telling (if you go explore the broom closet too many times, the next time you run through The Stanley Parable, you’ll find the broom closet has been boarded up so you can’t enter), and he occasionally breaks the 4th wall Deadpool style.

The story lasts through more than one run through of the office building. For example, at one point, you can confuse the narrator and make him realize that you’re a real person, that you’re not Stanley, and he puts you through other buildings (you’ll recognize more Half Life, and Portal here!), and he’ll also go quite angry at you when he decides to blow up the facility with a nuclear weapon.

Here is my suggestion – if you loooove FPS games to do head shots and high adrenaline fights, this is not the game for you. But, those of us who loved running through Portal more for the story than the physics puzzles, this game is super fun. I’ve already decided that at the next steam sale i’m probably going to drop at least $100 on this game and give copies to all my friends who don’t think they are gamers enough to pick up an FPS mod game!