"This is a bucket..."

"Dear God..."

"There's More..."

"No..."

Actually, that's more or less what else is added.

Somtimes I have periods in my life where I think my choices don't matter. Some actions just don't feel relevant enough to have an important outcome, right? The first "The Stanley Parable" really proved me wrong on that matter. I bought this game expecting a very simillar experience to what I remebered back when I bought the first game - just a simple redo. That said, I got really surprised with this game. "The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe" is a game with new content really adding up to the subject of choices and the story of the game. I'd really like to express what a pleasant experience the new game has been to me.

I'm going to start with reviewing the original aspects of the game that I feel are important. That said, let's talk about Narrator and the style of narration. The person speaking to the player during the game doesn't behave like a typical narrator would, as this one is clearly trying to write his own story, being emotional and engaged about it, not just commenting on the events that take place in the game. Trying to derail from the story makes the narrator kind of sad and angry, as he doesn't like player making choices. It breaks his perception of the story, because it makes it harder to go along the planned outcome.

Speaking of choices, I'd like to talk about that a bit more. Stanley - the main character from the game - is a person who initially didn't make any choices in his life. That's what gives the contrast in Narration and Gameplay when the choices you make as Stanley give massive outcomes in result. The whole game is made to push your curiosity to its limits, giving you plenty of opportunities to make choices, and see their results; not one being insignificant. This shows the selfishness of humans, as they want to satisfy that tingly sensation on the back of their heads, even at the cost of other people, in this example - the Narrator.

From the new content, we could certainly notice a little shift in the message. Stanley was presented all this new content mainly because of one aspect - other people's opinions. The game tries to show how much the behavior, enviroment and people can change just from words of other people. With the ocean of reviews, the Narrator tried to make the game even better in this new title. Narrator pushes it to extremes though, trying to make the game perfect in every possible aspect. This gives us another aspect of the game - Perfection. Nothing is perfect, and nothing ever will be. No matter how good even this game would be, there still will be people who will dislike it. If a person tries too hard to reach perfection, it can make the enviroment around them very hard to be in, and just straight up uncomfortable which the game shows really well.

On the finishing note, I feel that this game is a great addition to the original "The Stanley Parable". In my opinion, the original aspects of the game that made it so thought-provoking were left intact and the new content added a lot of good comedy and new things to think about. I bet there is still some stuff that is not discovered from this game, but that's my thoughts on it for now. So grab your favourite bucket, and play the game as soon as you can!

I love the original Stanley Parable to pieces. It's incredibly clever meta humor without being referential, hilarious at every point, and all around an amazing little game you can pour hours into and find hilarious consistently.

Ultra Deluxe makes itself more meta at the cost of being SIGNIFICANTLY less clever and funny. My initial impressions of the game were finding the elevator gags and being hopeful of what the game had to offer, but that was quickly dashed by the New Content. The joke is that not everyone liked the original Stanley Parable! But it was a very good game!! So we're gonna give you the same game with only an hour and a half of new content!!! Hahahaha!!!! Aren't we so FUNNY!!!!!!

I feel betrayed as a player not only because Ultra Deluxe forsakes what made it so clever in the first place, but doesn't even bother to give enough content to nearly justify its price tag. It also sabotages my favorite ending from the original, the Games Ending, by missing the entire point of the part where you play different and bigger games by just having the narrator be pissy during all of it. This isn't funny or serving into the original ending of him being desperate to give Stanley a fun experience, this is just being mad at games more people play.

If I need a single sentence to summarize my feelings about Ultra Deluxe, it would be this:
While the original game only reference Minecraft and Portal for the sake of a very elaborate joke, Ultra Deluxe lazily namedrops Skyrim and Persona 3 for the sake of a half-baked gag.

Although I will admit the pot shot at The Last of Us is pretty funny.

Do you know this one?
There once was a man with a bucket, and when his old lady left him, He said.
Oh, well, I still have my bucket!

-Lolly Poopdeck

I love you Crows Crows Crows but as the kids say, 'this ain't it, chief'. In a post-[One Shot/Undertale/Pony Island/The Magic Circle/The Beginner's Guide/Anodyne/Frog Fractions 2] gaming landscape there needs to be more that pushes the metanarrative envelope. There are some moments I think are rather great, particularly the Memory Zone and its acknowledgement of reviews and their effects on the creative process. At the same time, the Memory Zone's nostalgia for the original Stanley Parable exemplifies the difficulty if not impossibility for Ultra Deluxe to live up to its predecessor and the expectations placed upon itself. Rather than make some attempt, however foolish or brazen, to be an ambitious step forward, Ultra Deluxe is content with doing little and hoping it is enough.

There is the distinct possibility that Ultra Deluxe is not made for someone like me. That my exposure to so many metafictitious works has built in me some tolerance which necessitates a greater boundary break to achieve a similar high. Unfortunately it's impossible to say for certain.

As Woodaba has already highlighted, the bucket detracts more than it adds, amounting to little more than the equivalent of a mirror mode in Mario Kart. But whereas a mirror mode brings about a new perspective which is refreshing, the bucket's shines a spotlight on Ultra Deluxe's abject failure to say anything that hasn't been said. The idea of the bucket is vaguely funny in theory, but the actual effect on the player is that I am playing the exact same content as I was in 2013 but there is now a bucket and altered dialogue to reflect my ownership of the bucket. It simply isn't fun or enjoyable because it renders so crystalline the fact that nothing has changed. The meta has been replaced by the memetic.

The removal of Minecraft and Portal in favour of Rocket League and Firewatch are utterly bizarre to me. That rights have lapsed and neither bear the same cachet is plain, but their inclusion in spite of growing irrelevance would fare better than what we have ended up with. Firewatch is sensible insofar as it's another walking simulator, but it is even more irrelevant than Minecraft. One was the best selling game of all time which has had a profound and unwavering effect on our culture, the other is a good walking simulator which was renowned when it released and isn't really thought of any longer. I cannot say what would have worked better in its stead (Gone Home? Fortnite? Roblox???) and I understand these too would bear their own challenges. Swapping out Rocket League in Portal's place is the much stranger replacement in my eyes. The Portal transition worked as well as it did because Portal is another first person perspective game, in the same engine (at least as the Source mod), with a gimmick that allows that sudden change in view to another place. We haven't had another game in that vein since, I suppose, but the choice of Rocket League is obtuse as well. Rocket League was cool at the same time as Firewatch, neither are particularly interesting now. Maybe this is a consequence of a long development cycle, again it is impossible to know what could have been, what was, and what could have been better. What I do know is my mom knows what Portal and Minecraft are. My grandmother knows what Portal and Minecraft are. Many 'gamers' I know have no idea what Firewatch is and/or have never played Rocket League.

This is all to say that Ultra Deluxe suffers from the Stanley Parable's success. Little could have lived up to all of it's hype as a follow-up to the original, but that doesn't mean the lack of trying should be excused. Crows Crows Crows can clearly do phenomenal work - Dr. Langeskov was superb and Accounting is very funny - but just because their writers are so witty doesn't mean the game should just be jokes. Something could have been said here, and instead I feel like I got the equivalent of an Applause sign.

I bought this game based on a steam review that said "If you are like me and loved the original game, you are probably wondering "What new content is there? How well is it integrated into the base game? Why on earth would I pay another 20 dollars for a re-release of a 9 year old game?" My answer to this is go in blind and do a couple of runs. It will reveal itself and boy howdy will it be glorious." I guess this is my fault for a. trusting a steam review and b. not checking the playtime from that steam review which at the time of their writing was .5 hours. I only played this a couple more hours than the refund time, otherwise, I would have gotten my money back. I actually have never played the original to completion. I remember being really scared by the setting, despite being reassured by the internet over and over again, so I never went for any of the crazy endings. I figured that buying this would be a perfect opportunity to finish the endings that I hadn't done and check out the new content. I was very disappointed.

While you may not enjoy the original game, at the very least you can say it was tight. None of the locations feel wasted given how small the office area is, and you are rewarded with content everywhere you explore. This game shows that bigger is not necissarily better. The one area you do get to explore has nothing interesting going on in it and there are no choices you can make within it. Once you finally make it out of that area, you are rewarded with two new things: collectibles and a bucket. For the former, I personally enjoyed collecting them, but I found the commentary slightly amusing at best. It's not saying anything constuctive, just saying "ha ha collectibles in video games are meaningless ha ha". It's entirely possible I'm looking at the original game through rose-tinted glasses given the plethora of better media I've experienced since then, but I remembered the ideas that game had being more interested. At the very least the applied more specifically to video games then the sequel stuff, which has been done better so many times. If I wanted to consume a piece of media making fun of sequels I'd just rewatch Scream 2. However, these criticisms pail in comparison (I'm so funny) to the bucket.

The bucket is straight up bullshit that adds nearly nothing to the game except for padding it out. It adds miniscule amounts of new content to each of the endings, and for some of them all that is added is mention of the bucket. It's single joke is dragged on for way to long and it goes from being kind of funny to extremely tedious.

Even if it's a bad sequel on purpose, that doesn't mean it's good. I'm all for video game being boring for their art, but if you wanted to spend your time making a video game that's uninteresting and tedious for the sake of criticizing uninteresting and tedious games then you just throw your game on top of the garbage heap. I doubt that this is self aware though, because if it is it would have been made in a much shorter time frame and made a lot cheaper. If you think this is an interesting concept, just buy the original which is much cheaper. The extra content sours the overall game and you're much better off saving a few bucks. If you've already played the original I'd skip out on this.

Teh bucket of d00m.

A little disappointed with Ultra Deluxe on the whole. I was The Stanley Parable's biggest fan in 2011 - for being a free mod it was surprisingly cogent as an exploration of the metatext in being a player character in a perceivably linear world. The remake was a nice thing too, brushing up the concepts the mod introduced with some greater production values and more keen attention to detail, rounding off the branching paths it also expanded upon. While I'm nowhere near blown away by its observations (especially now that it's 2022 and the subject matter is rather rote by now), nor does its all-too-smug humour really tickle me in any way... it's undeniably satisfying to play a game that knows what to say and when. All bases covered, all nooks and crannies accounted for, everything you can do and everywhere you go triggers an event flag somewhere in the backrooms for the narrator to guffaw about. There's a toy-like quality to it idk, I'm really just like Stanley hitting buttons and listening to their accompanying sound effects.

Ultra Deluxe is... a few more things, all pretty scant. This almost Invader Zim-grade object comedy fixation on a funny bucket item you carry into old ending routes to modify them in minor ways, and the majority of the dialogue is still "press button to make narrator change subject". No guides or whatever are available at the time of me saying all this, who knows, maybe I've neglected to walk down a specific sequence of doors and missed a new skill tree system. They shifted the engine from Source to Unity, I'm sure it's a console porting decision and it certainly all looks better, but no longer getting banished to The Serious Room for setting sv_cheats to 1 removes the best rugpull from the game!!!!

Ultra Deluxe is still The Stanley Parable and holds up as the funny, cleverly written game it was nearly a decade ago. But now with console ports and new content that pokes fun at itself and how game trends have changed since 2013, pleasantly surprising just as much as the base version did. However for how the content’s been pushed and the larger price tag, I’m not sure I’d say it was substantial enough to stand on its own. But as an addition to an already good game, it’s well worth playing.

Also you can carry a reassurance bucket everywhere so clearly it’s the definitive experience.

It's easy to look back at The Stanley Parable and laugh at it. It is, after all, a kind of self-important game that said things about video games that were getting pretty tired even in 2013. I loved the Stanley Parable when I first played the mod, loved it a little less when I played the steam release, and ultimately have found it less and less compelling as time goes on, as the times in which the jokes landed got more and more distant and the commentary got more and more trite.

One might reasonably ask why such an aging process has harmed Stanley when it hasn't harmed other games on quite the same level, and my argument for that would be that Stanley, to use a memetic phrase devoid of meaning, insists upon itself. There's little room for interpretation or multifaceted interpretation of it: Stanley Parable is a two-dimensional game, and what I mean by that is that it works on two dimensions: the jokes, and the commentary. There aren't really any other characters or themes or aesthetic twists and flourishes to appreciate: it's a game that is very blunt about what it's saying, and doesn't really have anything to it other than that. Which is fine! Really! But it kinda relies on the things it's saying being really good, and maybe they were, once on the facepunch forums or on ModDb. But now? Not so much.

Which is why the prospect of Ultra Deluxe intrigued me. It represented an opportunity to provide a new experience, to build on what came before, and make a case for Stanley Parable still being relevant, over a decade after the original mod came out. Perhaps I built some unrealistic expectations for it going in, as I did honestly think that a Rebuild of Stanley Parable was the right step to take for this, and I remember feeling similarly deflated by the steam release of Stanley hewing so close to the original mod, but regardless, The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe arrives with the enthusiastic impact of a wet fart in an empty room, not so much making a case for the relevance of the work in 2022 as making a supreme demonstration for it's growing irrelevance.

What we have here is an acceptable repackaging of the original game (with some pluses being options to sidestep some of the edgier stuff in the original release, namely the unbearably cringeworthy suicide sequence, and some minuses being the stripping out of jokes in the subtitles and the loss of the language of jokes that Source familiarity provided) alongside some, on the whole, pretty dire new content. Teeth-grindingly ancient observations on collectibles and DLC that would make CTRL+ALT+DEL groan paired with the Bucket. The fucking bucket. All the bucket stuff is absolutely unbearable humor that felt like being trapped in 2012-era reddit with people going on about narwhals and bacon. The superfluity of The Bucket Arc is clearly an argument about the futility of adding extra content in a re-release, but you still went and did it, and it was shit. It's satirical bent never rises above putting a dunce hat on itself and going "look at how dumb we're being". Ultra Deluxe has the same problem as Stanley Parable proper: it cannot help but slam you in the face with it's Point and it's Jokes, and when those land it works, but in Ultra Deluxe they almost never do, so you're just left trudging through a tediously unfunny experience reliving 2015 neoGAF in the most agonizing manner imaginable.

Ultra Deluxe is not without merit: there are truly talented artists and level designers at Crows Crows Crows, and they've crafted some really amazing spaces here. It's something they're really great at: their online multiplayer game/space TheClub.zone (which was shut down to give them time to develop this lol) is proof positive of that. But underneath the enormous weight of The Writing, they're never allowed to live, to breathe beyond the confines of The Writing's vehicle, and unfortunately, The Writing here is crap. It's as simple as that.

I wanted Ultra Deluxe to let me love Stanley Parable again. To prove once and for all that it has stood the test of time, that it does have a worthwhile place in video games and video game culture. But after seeing everything Ultra Deluxe has to offer, all I can do is sigh wearily, and type my review, which is as follows.

(ahem)

"Reddit Game."

Like so many, I enjoyed my time with the original Stanley Parable, which underscores how truly disappointed I am with its sequel. Where the first game teemed with originality, The Stanley Parable 2 is dull, uninspired, and often insulting to its fan base. Rather than expand on what made the first game enjoyable, the sequel veers off into territory nobody asked for. An infinitely deep hole? Who cares? Where are the new endings? What about enjoyable bits from The Stanley Parable 1, like the Adventure Line? Instead, we get an uninspired sidequest collecting figurines. Even this diversion feels incomplete: collecting all the figurines gives you nothing! I must say though, I found the bucket to be quite comforting, a welcome reprieve from