The Stanley Parable
The Stanley Parable is a story-based video game designed and written by developers Davey Wreden and William Pugh. In the game, the player guides a silent protagonist named Stanley alongside narration by British actor Kevan Brighting. As the story progresses, the player is confronted with diverging pathways. The player may contradict The Narrator's directions, which, if disobeyed, will be incorporated into the story. Depending on the choices made, the player will encounter different endings before the game resets to the beginning.
The Stanley Parable was originally released on July 31, 2011, as a free modification for Half-Life 2 by Wreden. Together with Pugh, Wreden later released a stand-alone remake using the Source engine under the Galactic Cafe studio name. The remake recreated many of the original mod's choices while adding new areas and story pathways, as well as overhauling the game's graphics entirely. It was announced and approved via Steam Greenlight in 2012, and was released on October 17, 2013, for Windows. Later updates to the game added support for macOS on December 19, 2013, and for Linux on September 9, 2015. An expanded edition titled The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe was released on April 27, 2022. It is currently available on consoles, in addition to previously supported platforms, and includes additional content and improved graphics. An iOS port of Ultra Deluxe was released on October 7, 2024.
Both the original mod and its two remakes received critical acclaim and commercial success. Reviewers praised the game's narrative and commentary on player choice and decision-making, the game selling over one million copies within a year of release. The game and its themes of choice, the relationship between a game creator and player, and predestination/fate have been the subject of significant analysis.
Gameplay and synopsis
''The Stanley Parable'' (2013)
The player has a first-person perspective, and can travel and interact with certain elements of the environment, such as pressing buttons or opening doors, but has no combat or other action-based controls. The Narrator presents the story to the player. He explains that the protagonist Stanley is employee 427 in an office building. Stanley is tasked to monitor data coming from a computer screen and press buttons appropriately without question. One day, the screen monitoring data goes blank, which has never happened before. Stanley, unclear on what to do, begins to explore the building and discovers that the workplace is completely abandoned.At this stage, the story splits off in numerous possibilities, based on the player's choices. When the player comes to an area where a choice is possible, the player can opt to follow the Narrator's directions or perform the opposing action. The initial decision is a set of two open doors. The Narrator notes that Stanley traveled through the leftmost door, but this has not yet occurred. The Narrator takes the player's choices into account, reacting with new narration or attempts to return the player back to the target path if he is contradicted. For example, if the player were to follow the Narrator's directions and pass through the leftmost door, the story of the missing employees proceeds. Alternatively, the player can choose the rightmost door, causing the Narrator to adjust his story. In this case, he will urge the player to return to the "proper" path, although the player can continuously disobey the Narrator, resulting in other adjustments to the story. In some instances, the Narrator breaks the fourth wall when reacting to the player's decisions.
In the original 2011 mod, there were six different endings. Wreden stated it would take about an hour for the player to experience them all. The 2013 remake added more than ten endings, altered some pre-existing endings and the respective routes to trigger them, as well as several Easter eggs, and other choice-related aspects.
''The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe'' (2022)
Ultra Deluxe expands on the game's endings further, including further routes, new environments, and additional endings. Players can select an option stating they've played the game before in order to access the new content quicker, as otherwise it takes playing several endings before the new content becomes accessible to the player. The player, as Stanley, discovers a new area of the game proclaiming "new content", among which is a bucket that can be used to alter the game's various endings. Another potential route added has the Narrator guide Stanley to a new area called the Memory Zone, which recounts all the praise that The Stanley Parable had gotten, but soon finds an area full of Steam user reviews that are critical of the game, which leads the Narrator to further distress that The Stanley Parable was not good enough. Once all new content is completed, which includes a route in which Stanley discovers "The Stanley Parable 2" has received a negative critical response, the title screen will change to depict the new title, with no new further changes to content.Development
The original Stanley Parable was released as a mod of Half-Life 2. Davey Wreden, 22 years old at the time of the mod's release, was inspired to create The Stanley Parable about three years prior, after considering the typical storytelling narratives within video games, and thinking of what would happen if the player would go against that narration; he also saw this as a means towards his planned career as a game developer. As a video game player, Wreden found that most major triple-A titles at the time made many assumptions about the player's experience and fitted that within the game, and rarely provided answers for "what if" questions that the player may consider. Wreden believed that recent games with more engaging or thought-provoking stories, including the Metal Gear Solid series, Half-Life 2, Portal, Braid, and BioShock, started to approach this void, giving reason for the player to stop and think about the narration instead of simply going through the motions. Though his initial intent was a personal project simply to try to make such a game that asked the questions about why people play video games, Wreden found that there were other gamers that had been considering the same type of questions. He set out to make a game that would be the subject of discussion for players after they completed it. According to Wreden, his design document for the game was "Mess with the player's head in every way possible, throwing them off-guard, or pretending there's an answer and then kinda whisking it away from in front of them." Wreden decided to use an "unconventional narrator" in order to work with the idea of what would happen if the player elected to disobey the narrator.With no prior experience working with the Source engine, Wreden relied heavily on information and help from wikis and forums on the Source Development Kit, teaching himself the fundamentals. Outside of Kevan Brighting's voice-over contributions, The Stanley Parable was all Wreden's work. Wreden used an audition process to find a narrator, and found Brighting's submission to be ideal for the game. Brighting had provided his voice in a single pass. Wreden wanted to keep the game short so as to allow players to experience all the endings without spending an excessive amount of time replaying the game. The shortness of the game would also allow him to introduce ridiculous and nonsensical endings, such as "and then everything was happy!", that would otherwise insult the player as a poor reward for completing a long game. Most of the ideas he had envisioned for the game were included, though some had to be dropped due to his inability to figure out how to work with them within the Source engine. In one case, Wreden wanted to include a point where the player would have to press buttons as the narration and screen prompts would have said, but could not figure out how to bind keyboard input to do this, but left the element in there as a "broken" puzzle; he later was praised for this, as to players, this gave the impression of lacking control during the stage of narration. Despite the success of completing the game, Wreden considered the overall project "grueling" and stifling of his career ambition, noting that his efforts became more intense once he started learning of other players' interest in the title.
Wreden initially tested the game with a friend before posting the mod to the website ModDB on July 31, 2011, a few weeks prior to his graduation from college. After graduating, Wreden had left for Australia with intent to open a video game-themed bar similar to the Mana Bar, which he had worked at for about a year, but his future plans changed with success of the mod. Wreden had started to receive various offers from others to help work on new games as well as some job offers from larger developers which he turned down, as at the time it was "not the kind of scene" he wanted to work in. Instead, he started to gather other independent programmers to work out an improved version of The Stanley Parable and leading towards a completely new title in the future.
2013 remake
Shortly after the release of the original mod, Wreden was contacted by William Pugh, a player who had experience in creating environments within the Source engine and had previously won a Saxxy Award for his work. Pugh had heard of the mod through word of mouth, and after being impressed with playing it, saw that Wreden was looking for help for improving the mod. The two collaborated each day for two years for the revamped mod. Though initially Wreden wanted to recreate the original game "beat for beat", his discussions with Pugh led to them deciding to alter existing material and add more, an "interpolation" of the original game, and creating a stand-alone title. The remake includes the six endings from the original, as well as updating the game with several newly created endings. Brighting returned to voice the Narrator in the remake, as Wreden considered his performance "half the reason this game has been successful". Additionally, a custom soundtrack was created for the remake, composed by Blake Robinson, Yiannis Ioannides, and Christiaan Bakker.Pugh collaborated with Wreden on The Narrator's script, with each of them adding elements that would then be tweaked and expanded upon by the other. One would also make changes to the environment, which another would then use to flesh out The Narrator's personality. Wreden stated that the first scene where the player can make a choice—in which The Narrator states Stanley went through the left door while the player can elect to also choose the right door—was designed carefully to make sure players did not see anything wrong with the moment, wanting the choice to be made by the player of their own agency and thinking. Pugh additionally noted The Narrator's bias in constructing a story played a role in the game's development in terms of the office's visual appearance, stating that the lack of various usual office-based objects would be the result of the narrator not considering to include unimportant functional items. Davey Wreden stated that the game was about the relationship between the player and The Narrator, with Wreden saying that "I don't think it's a power struggle between you and me, but I also don't think it's really a power struggle between Stanley and the narrator. Ultimately, these things are trying to understand one another, but they're having great difficulty doing so." He additionally noted that the potential for reconciliation between the player and The Narrator was always there, but entirely dependent on how players choose to play the game. According to Wreden, the split between those who elect to follow The Narrator's advice and those who do not was around a "fifty-fifty split."
In play-testing the newer version, Pugh found that players did not respond well to having a preconceived idea of where the divergent points in the game took place, as represented by a flowchart early in the game, and this was taken out. However, Pugh also found that without some visual cues as to where divergent paths occurred, they would often miss these choices, and so added elements like colors to highlight that a choice was available at these points. In the original modification, one route has the player travel to sections modeled after elements in Half-Life 2. In the remake, Pugh and Wreden included one route where the player is dropped into a Minecraft world, and another where the player briefly revisits the opening of Portal, before being trapped in the original 2011 mod version of The Stanley Parable. These routes were included after getting approval from their creators Markus Persson and Valve, respectively.
To distribute the new version, the team initially considered a pay what you want scheme, but later sought the use of the Steam Greenlight service, where independent developers can solicit votes from other players in order to have Valve subsequently offer the title through Steam. In October 2012, the game was successfully approved by Valve to be included on Steam upon the game's completion. Although Wreden originally called the stand-alone version The Stanley Parable: HD Remix, he later opted to drop the distinguishing title, affirming that he believed the remake is the "definitive" version of the game. The macOS version was later released on December 19, 2013, expanding to support for Linux on September 9, 2015.
In August 2016, Galactic Cafe partnered with IndieBox, a monthly subscription box service, to create an exclusive, custom-designed, physical release of the game. This limited collector's edition included a DRM-free game CD, the official soundtrack, an instruction manual, a Steam key, and various collectibles including an "Adventure Tie" and "Existential Mousepad".