Narrator: Stanley has finished a new game, so now he will write a serious and great review about.
.....
Narrator: But Stanley decided to write an ironic review full of silly jokes that won't add anything to the backlogdd, come on Stanley, you know that very well.
....
Narrator: Look Stanley, I know we're off on the right foot here, but trust yourself, you can make a nice, concise review of The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe. Think about your friends at backlogdd, what will they think of you if all you do is write pathetic reviews?
....
Narrator: At this point you are doing this to me on purpose Stanley. I'm surprised how anyone still follows you on this website.
....
Narrator: You know what? I'm done. Just write what you want.

"The real bucket was inside of him all along. It was incredibly painful." - The Narrator

WHAT A FUCKING TRIP HOLYYYY

A tremendous, comedic, metafictional masterpiece that is also a REMARKABLY tedious game that I believe everyone should experience at least once in their lives. It's so full of ideas and has purposeful core messages about meaningful choices, about the dichotomy between personal artistry and a demand for content and sequels, and about video game narratives, despite appearing to be contrary. You have to 100% this game to really soak in all the incredible stuff, regardless of the dullness of repeat playthroughs. A true rebel of a video game. 8.5/10

Hmm, I don't know! I think The Stanley Parable was somewhat of a moment in history, and a big part of its charm was that it came and went. This "Ultra Deluxe" expansion is basically an excuse to add in a bunch more jokes, and that's fine - and they're pretty funny and elaborate and all but...I'm not sure this justifies its own existence so much?

For one thing, you basically need to replay the original to an ending like 4 or 5 times before you can even start seeing the new stuff, and then the new stuff is good but I think the novelty has just worn off. The tedium of just kinda walking around a room in circles waiting for the narrator to say something new, to see if he'll even remark on the fact that you're staying in insert silly room has gotten pretty grating by now. That's the game. You do a silly thing, see if the narrator says anything about it. The original had just about enough stuff that you could walk away before that got old, but underneath all the bells and whistles, Ultra Deluxe is just more of the same.

Maybe my criticism is flawed in that regard, maybe it's me! I could hardly have expected this to overhaul any kind of gameplay system or fundamentally change what The Stanley Parable is - I just think it got a bit old a bit too fast. There's some really good jokes in here. The Endless Hole, The Bucket, The Button That Says Jim, all funny stuff. So why do I feel like coming back is such a chore? I really appreciate what this game does, but I think Ultra Deluxe is them taking the idea bigger but not further, if that makes sense? The jokes are different, and yet it still feels pretty "been there, done that." It's weird! This is a hard game to talk about and an even harder game to criticise. I like it, I think it's funny, I appreciate what it's going for, I'm just a bit over it by now!

If you’re interested in reading my take on the original content, you can check my entry of the 2013 version of The Stanley Parable.

Now for the new content: I feel like i might have played it at a very bad time. This edition was my first experience with The Stanley Parable, and i loved it, but maybe playing the new content right away wasn’t a good decision. I just felt it like it was, let’s say, too bureaucratic. Like, collecting figurines? It’s a bit of a change in terms of gameplay, which is not a good or bad thing by itseld, but I don’t know, i just didn’t vibe with it. Still, there were a few good ideas here and there, and also, i can’t help but feeling that idea of expanding on something to the core of wasting it and making it tiring is actually the concept that consciously drives this whole expansion. So maybe i was supposed to feel this way. I guess i’ll have to give it another shot in the future.

Sights & Sounds
- Pretty barebones first person 3D visuals without much stylization. It's a narrative-focused game, so it's easy to let it slide
- Really not much by way of music
- The voice acting (or, really, the voice actor) is outstanding. It's an all-time performance that shouldn't be missed

Story & Vibes
- This is one of those games where the plot is inconsequential but the narrative isn't. It doesn't matter who Stanley is or why his office is so weird. You're here to hear someone yammer on about the mechanics of storytelling and the philosophy of ludicological choice for a few hours
- Not that any of that is a bad thing. It's nice to turn over a few metanarrative stones once in a while to see what's wriggling around down there
- The Super Deluxe Edition presents some additional discourse regarding DLC and player expectation
- The whole package is incredibly funny

Playability & Replayability
- All you have to do is listen to the narrator. Or don't. There are no stakes
- Exploration is highly encouraged. If you see the opportunity to go off course, it's usually worth the trouble
- There's not really any gameplay mechanics beyond what you'd expect from a walking simulator. I guess you could think of trying to find all the endings as one big metapuzzle if it makes you feel better
- It feels a little strange to talk about replayability in a game that essentially requires regular replays in order to find the endings. I wouldn't call it "infinitely repayable", but you'll be starting from the beginning a lot

Overall Impressions & Performance
- Ran exceptionally well on the Steam Deck
- This game obviously has the reputation of a classic and you don't need my recommendation. It's a game for people who love to think about games. Although the experience will stick with you for a while, it's not really going to change too much about your perspective on your video game habits

Final Verdict
- 8/10. Certainly worth a play. It's not an exceptionally fun or even a particularly satisfying experience, but it will make you laugh and think. If you missed it the first time around, definitely pick up this edition

The Stanley Parable is my favourite indie game of all time. It combines so many things that I love and crafts them into a hilarious mind bending experience that I really think everyone should try.

This game manages to create one of the creepiest atmospheres just purely via the sound design alone. The Stanley Parable uses silence as a tension builder really effectively as you normally have the narrator talking away but when everything goes silent, it really builds up that amazing creepy atmosphere.

Speaking off The Narrator, he is amazingly portrayed by Kevan Brighting who conveys so many different emotions so well through a character who you dont even see. The Narrator really makes this game what it is with all of his meta dialogue which is something that I am a huge fan of and this feeds right into the next part.

The Stanley Parable is one of the best non linear games you can get. I think there is 42 endings in total including ones added in the Ultra Deluxe edition, which makes for a good few hours of playtime. Thankfully most endings can be either stumbled upon or worked out by taking different paths. Since the game doesn't tell you which endings you have and haven't got, if you are going the completionist route looking up a guide is probably a good idea. Each ending feels different and has really unique dialogue, a few of my favourites are: "The Zending", "The Games Ending", "The Not-Stanley Ending" and "The Confusion Ending".

Visually for an indie game it looks fantastic, great landscapes and textures. The office looks great and is designed in a great way where you can never really know what you are going to turn the corner and see. It also features some amazing ambience music.

One of the best Indie games of all time and 100% worth playing.

As a remake of The Stanley Parable, yeah of course it’s great, very compelling with lots to see and do.

As an expansion to The Stanley Parable? It’s a bit disappointing. There’s a decent amount of new things to see, such as commentary on sequels and the affect of steam reviews on creators, and it’s very well done. Once that is over, the rest of the new content are just remixes of all the other endings, except they are centered around a bucket. It really felt like it was building to a new ending, but nope. You just see all the remixed endings eventually and that’s it. I wasn’t expecting a sequel or anything like that, but it’s just the fact that there is all this new content, but none of it really results in anything.

Overall, if you’ve never played The Stanley Parable, this is the version of the game to get. If you’ve already played The Stanley Parable, you’re not missing out on very much.

This review came out really harsh. My only hope is my own ramblings are more insightful or entertaining than the hot garbage they charged $25 for.

This expansion is honestly so devoid of any meaning that it's made me doubt if Wreden had anything thought-provoking to say ever, or if it was purely my projection that made The Beginner's Guide seem thematically powerful as a kid. It's been months since I played this, but while recently compiling a list of games I've played these past few years I was just overwhelmed by how unfathomably terrible a product this game is the more I thought about it. Genuinely one of the biggest wastes of money you could possibly get, in an industry I didn't think could get any worse with microtransaction hell. Let me try to walk you through just how shallow nearly every new addition to this game is, so that hopefully you can understand just how my jaw is agape thinking about how this unfinished mess was a streamer delight for weeks. Bennett Foddy - whose Getting Over It I still think is the most misunderstood game of the century - foreshadowed the age of "found object" games and now you get shit like this and Only Up! getting millions of views without an ounce of shame.

The skip button section has nothing to say. The narrator adds a skip button in a confined room because some critics were requesting it. Skipping dialogue here doesn't actually affect anything in the game; it's entirely scripted for a five minute section where you are actually FORCED to "skip" to even progress. If you try sitting and listening through his monologue before "skipping", not only are the sections poorly looped where lines cut into one another, he has absolutely nothing to say. Not even some mundane story to tell, the entire monologue is exclusively nonsense. If this is meant to be a comment on artists failing to take criticism and going insane, it's hard to give a shit when there's no original vision that's being altered to include the skip button. So what is the joke here? That the game's writing took a fucking nosedive and removed any specificity whatsoever? In fact, that's a running theme here. This entire expansion just vaguely gestures at "bad game practices" that I can't think of a single other game doing, essentially making this a game that's purposefully bad as "satire" for nothing in particular but itself.

The consequences for skipping dialogue don't make sense either. Time in the game world progresses when you skip, which is supposed to convey what? That players are messing with the logic of the world by doing things on their own terms? Sure, this is probably frustrating as an author, and I don't really respect people who - for example - fast forward through movies. But, at the end of the day, what is the point of making fun of players who skip dialogue? If skipping dialogue doesn't change the fundamental meaning of the scenes, as is the case here, why is a fuss being made about doing so? Skipping dialogue in video games typically happens when someone is replaying and/or trying to go through it faster to reach the more difficult content, yet something this fundamental to the thing he is making fun of is never once brought up.

This is because the entire skip button section isn't actually about the concept of skipping in video games at all, but about some stupid fucking reviews people left on Steam intentionally targeted at the narrator for being annoying. It's the equivalent of a fucking Reddit post making fun of someone's dumb comment about a product, except the guy has a meltdown about it and somehow the meltdown itself isn't even funny. You can't just go "UNFUNNY!???" towards a shitty comment and automatically be considered funny, you have to put effort into writing jokes with some kind of layers supporting them - which I thought Wreden was fully capable of but maybe I was just fucking hallucinating last decade because that could not have been the same person that wrote this shit. The base game arguably had some of this with its premise of the narrator and the player being in an endless battle, with neither coming out that much better. Yet this expansion is no longer interested in that tension between audience and authorial media analysis, if the games were ever interested or just blowing smoke up our asses the entire time. We basically just have a bunch of sections where the narrator decides to make fun of a random fucking player request for an entire level. Here's two more examples:

What about collectibles? What game out there adds collectibles to the base game after a decade and charges you full price for the expansion? Name one game that fits this criteria that the game is supposedly making fun of, because I'd be fucking fuming at that game, but the only game I can think of that pulls such a gross stunt is this one. The closest thing I can think of is when AAA games have prepurchase rewards that include more collectibles, which is still questionable but a very different situation from buying the whole game all over again. We also have varying levels of remasters, with the most egregious probably being The Last of Us which does a graphical overhaul no one asked for and pretty much nothing else. There's also shit like Nintendo Switch ports that charge full price for ports; I guess that could be what's happening here? So, is the game trying to criticize itself for needing to "expand itself" to justify being ported to newer systems, because that would be an actually interesting thing to talk about for indie games especially with how awful game preservation is. If this was indeed an intended theme of the game, it's barely touched on because the game wants to treat these half-hearted "expansions" as funny in and of themselves.

I've heard Todd Howard once promised to try making voice actors say the player's name a thing, but has anyone seriously been asking for this enough to make a joke about it? The narrator is taking a shot at self-righteous players who think they're very important by imagining a feature no one asked for. What about all the shit recently with right wing mods removing gender and race options in RPGs, an actual fucking real-life situation you can satirize instead of this lazy nonsense? Is this a joke about Todd Howard and people like him trying to implement a difficult feature that barely does anything but jerk the player off? What's the joke? How can you make fun of writers who cater to audiences when they have nothing to say when that's exactly what's happening here?

Every single issue Ultra Deluxe brings up feels like it focuses on the least interesting party. It focuses on the lazy criticisms from shallow audiences instead of how they affect how the author creates. It focuses on the bad products that result from shitty industry standards rather than how those standards affect artistic creativity. It's like it's asking the audience to give up hope for creativity under these circumstances, even though they've lasted long before this game's release, by intentionally making itself the most noncommittal, boring game you've ever seen. This game is so depressing that I honestly hope Wreden and co. get into a better mindset because this fucking shit is embarrassing for a writer who felt like such an icon in the indie game scene for a little while. Infinite hole scene innocent though.