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.

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 The meta has been replaced by the memetic.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.

Just a disclaimer, I never played the original so this was my first experience with the game. I've always been curious about it, and was even subscribed to the newsletter about this version for god knows how long, pretty sure that It would just never release. But now it finally did. Here's my thoughts.

I think, in part, that my appreciate of this game was set up for disappointment at the start. Over the years I was sure I'd love it and with all the good reviews, without knowing I put it up on a bit of a pedestal. And no matter what, in the end I wouldn't like it quite as much as I thought I would. And well, It's true. It didnt captivate me like I hoped, but thats honestly a silly thing to mention because I really enjoyed it nonetheless. There is a lot to like here. The normal, follow the narrator, Stanley freedom ending you can get in like 10-15 minutes yourself itself is pretty thought provoking. I dont really think the game ever surpasses that height, but thats not to say that the rest doesn't deliver. Theres plenty of charm and clever/funny moments. Plenty of fresh ideas. The new content is quite enjoyable as well, it serves as a good extension to the base game. I didnt get all the endings (I'll likely come back to this sometime), but i got a lot and did enough to get the Epilogue ending, which to me is basically the "true ending". I think theres some good meta commentary and whatnot on sequels here, and it feels like a good conclusion to the game, I feel satisfied and like I had a full, complete experience. I love the never-ending joke about the title screen

The game isnt perfect though. At a point, it can grow tired. The charm of the narrator can wear off and his droning can get grating. Theres even a good bit about this that addresses it, but that doesnt change the fact that it still made the game feel a bit monotonous at times. Also there recurring bit of ignoring and annoying the narrator gets old kinda quick. Nonetheless, the game was still entertaining at the base level of its premise, and all the options and "choices" make the occasional sloggy parts bearable.

All in all, It's a pretty clever and unique little game. It mentions Persona 3 and Firewatch which while pretty out of place was neat regardless.

Trophy Completion - 72%
Time Played - 5 hours 30 minutes (estimated)
Nancymeter - 88/100
Game Completion #49 of 2022
April Completion #18

The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe is an enhanced version of a classic game with more content. Originally developed exclusively for PC, this deluxe edition brings the game to all modern consoles.

During the game, we control Stanley, an ordinary office worker. One day, he discovers that all his coworkers have disappeared, and he explores his workplace to find out what is happening. Meanwhile, a narrator tells us what Stanley is doing and what he needs to do. It is up to the player to decide whether to trust the narrator or not.

It is a puzzle game with different endings that take around 30 minutes each. To unlock all the endings, you need to explore all the different possibilities. There is no one true ending, and you have to explore everything to understand what is happening.

The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe offers new content for returning players. Although I haven't played the original version, the game makes it clear what the new content is, so I believe that even those who played the game when it was originally released will have a great time.

The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe is a unique game. It demonstrates how video games can differ from everything else in the entertainment industry. The Stanley Parable is a work of art.

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!!!!

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."