HomeFeaturesThe Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe
The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe has a cursed awareness of its own weird, culty relevanceI don’t plan on playing it again until 2032
I don’t plan on playing it again until 2032
The Stanley Parableis 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 aHalf-Life 2mod, 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 inThe 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.
The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe - Release Date TrailerWatch on YouTube
The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe - Release Date Trailer
The original Stanley Parable arrived not long after Little Big Planet had launched, a seminal puzzle platformer in which a helpful British man – in this case the wonderful Stephen Fry, the ur-vocal-cords of this particular genre – explained how all of the various buttons worked, and what a human imagination was capable of. (Spoiler: it was anything.)
Almost overnight, tender-sounding white British men with warm cardigan voices, aged between 45 and 65, who spoke with an accent specific to parts of the south of England and certain educational institutions, were the hottest ticket in town. After centuries of being overlooked and taken for granted, their time had finally come.
So that’s the state we were in 2011, and again in 2013 when The Stanley Parable mod was rereleased as a “proper” thing. The game was critically beloved for its very clever, branching script, its dry meta-humour and its myriad surprise endings, but even more so for Kevan Brighting’s star performance as The Narrator, an especially genial-sounding British man who remains The Stanley Parable’s one and only voiced character.
But a lot has changed since 2013. We’ve changed. Our brief obsession with the cosy vocal cords of kind-hearted British men – who sound like they read very big newspapers near a fireplace and smell like dust and peanuts – has gone the way of flash mobs, really big skirts, and that iPhone app that made it look like you were drinking a beer.
So where does that leave The Stanley Parable and its mellifluous narrator in the year 2022? The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe is not quite a remake, or a remaster, it’s certainly not a sequel, and it’s sort of an expansion pack if you don’t think about it too much. The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe doesn’t like to say what it is, so I’m not going to tell you here either, but I’ll say that there is some new stuff on top of all of the original stuff, and that the new stuff is really, really surprising and funny.
At its core this is still a very silly game about not doing what a big voice tells you to do, but a decade of introspection has gifted The Stanley Parable a cursed awareness of its own weird, culty relevance, which this remake expresses with some beautifully weird and entertainingly self-indulgent new ideas. I love every last bit of it, so much that I don’t plan on playing it again until 2032.
