The Stanley Parable
The Stanley Parable is a puzzle adventure game developed and published by Galactic Cafe and first released on Windows on 2013-10-17, and then ported to Macintosh and Linux. The game uses the Source Engine. You play Stanley, an office drone who one day wakes up in his office to find that everyone is gone. A voice narrates a parable about what Stanley is supposed to do, but you have the option of doing something else and tripping up the story. Each time the player goes off-script, strange things happen.
I remember hearing about this game from a friend who said it was pretty interesting, but I waited until it came out in a Humble Indie Bundle before getting it. It remained unplayed for months more, but I eventually got around to playing it.
Status
I own this game on Steam and have seen the majority of the endings. I have 6/10 achievements.
Review
- Overall: 5/10
- Best Version: Windows
— This section contains spoilers! —
Good
- The graphics, music, sound effects, and narration are all well done.
- The writing is pretty great, there were several times I laughed out loud.
- The environments are all generally eerie and strange.
- The various endings run the gamut of funny, creepy, and thought-provoking.
Bad
- Despite the many variations, I often felt like there wasn't enough to do in the game, and routinely found myself beating the same ending several times because I couldn't think of anything else to do.
- For some reason, they didn't make each ending an achievement, so you can't get global stats on them. Also, many of the achievements are lame: restart the game, don't play the game, leave the game running all day, click on a door 430 times. These are not fun, they're tedious.
Ugly
- Nothing.
Media
Maps
Flowchart of all choices.
Flowchart of all endings.
Video
- youtube.com/watch?v=JvluYOv9DD8 - Longplay, all endings.
Links
