The Stanley Parable is a game about a man who leaves his desk one day to discover that all of his most difficult to animate colleagues have vanished. First released in 2011 as a Half-Life 2 mod, it is a wild fantasy about what it might be like to not be in front of the computer for a while. There’s also some bonus themes in here about determinism in narrative fiction and the illusion of choice, framed as a satire of contemporary game design, but also as an incisive commentary on the notion of free will in general.
But most of all, I think that The Stanley Parable is a game about not being in front of the computer for a little while, as a treat. There’s an achievement you get for not playing the game for five years, and in The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe – a remastered version for consoles that adds some new content – there’s another achievement for ten. If they could implement an achievement for feeding all of your worldly belongings into a woodchipper and staggering naked into the forest to live with the animals, they probably would.
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