Oh, god. What to say? Weird ranty, unfocused review incoming.
The Stanley Parable, in it's original state was a whip-smart, clever, and chuckle-inducing romp that subverted the expectations of traditional game design, allowing the player to push back against what are normally conceived as rigid boundaries, designing for the aspects of games that most people think "they couldn't have possibly thought of that, could they?"
It became viral with the help of word-of-mouth reviews as well as (though I doubt the game's originators William Pugh or Davey Wreden would be happy to admit it) let's play videos. It blew up on Youtube as the kind of "oh I wonder what my favorite personality would think of this silly thing" kind of trend for a while, and made a name for itself as a genuinely clever piece of work about the nature of choice (and lack thereof) in games, and whether the fourth wall is really your friend or not.
The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe is odd. It's mired in a cloak of marketing that defines it as "refreshed, yet familiar" and yet is itself the core of an identity crisis about it's own meteoric rise to fame.
A very long, overdrawn bit wherein the orgulous, yet iconically lovable Narrator prods fun at reviews of the original Stanley Parable left by journalists and community members alike seems difficult to distinguish whether Wreden, the game's writer, is venting about his "art" being unfortunately misconstrued or if this is just some odd, several-layers-of-irony laden pit that the "character" of the Narrator has found himself unable to escape from.
Wreden has not minced words in the past about the burden of expectation placed on those who find themselves in the shoes of the "creator" (see: The Beginner's Guide), yet so much of this game seems to fall flat at being a source for absurd laughs. Self-aggrandizement (and deprecation, for that matter), for better or worse, just isn't that funny anymore.
I do admire the effort placed into this new experience, it's clear it's been done from a place of love for the art rather than an obligation to make something new about The Stanley Parable, yet something about it all just kind of leaves a bit of a sour taste in the mouth, and a rolling in the eyes.
I think this game missed it's mark to be it's most impactful version of itself. Had it been released a handful of years earlier (an impossible ask, I realize,) it feels as though it would've been much more prescient and "of the moment."
Instead, The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe simply feels like a remnant of an age long past, an age before mass corporate franchise consolidation, before shared IP universes, before the demolition of the fourth wall, before the news became which ideas belong to which boardrooms and how and why they're going to show up on X Y and Z platforms.
The internet full of Paying Consumers Who Vote Virtuously With Their Wallets knows what it wants, and it's just economical to give it just that and nothing more. The Fourth Wall can't be subverted anymore, because it simply isn't there.
Call me cringe if you must, but damn, I kind of miss 2013.
The Stanley Parable, in it's original state was a whip-smart, clever, and chuckle-inducing romp that subverted the expectations of traditional game design, allowing the player to push back against what are normally conceived as rigid boundaries, designing for the aspects of games that most people think "they couldn't have possibly thought of that, could they?"
It became viral with the help of word-of-mouth reviews as well as (though I doubt the game's originators William Pugh or Davey Wreden would be happy to admit it) let's play videos. It blew up on Youtube as the kind of "oh I wonder what my favorite personality would think of this silly thing" kind of trend for a while, and made a name for itself as a genuinely clever piece of work about the nature of choice (and lack thereof) in games, and whether the fourth wall is really your friend or not.
The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe is odd. It's mired in a cloak of marketing that defines it as "refreshed, yet familiar" and yet is itself the core of an identity crisis about it's own meteoric rise to fame.
A very long, overdrawn bit wherein the orgulous, yet iconically lovable Narrator prods fun at reviews of the original Stanley Parable left by journalists and community members alike seems difficult to distinguish whether Wreden, the game's writer, is venting about his "art" being unfortunately misconstrued or if this is just some odd, several-layers-of-irony laden pit that the "character" of the Narrator has found himself unable to escape from.
Wreden has not minced words in the past about the burden of expectation placed on those who find themselves in the shoes of the "creator" (see: The Beginner's Guide), yet so much of this game seems to fall flat at being a source for absurd laughs. Self-aggrandizement (and deprecation, for that matter), for better or worse, just isn't that funny anymore.
I do admire the effort placed into this new experience, it's clear it's been done from a place of love for the art rather than an obligation to make something new about The Stanley Parable, yet something about it all just kind of leaves a bit of a sour taste in the mouth, and a rolling in the eyes.
I think this game missed it's mark to be it's most impactful version of itself. Had it been released a handful of years earlier (an impossible ask, I realize,) it feels as though it would've been much more prescient and "of the moment."
Instead, The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe simply feels like a remnant of an age long past, an age before mass corporate franchise consolidation, before shared IP universes, before the demolition of the fourth wall, before the news became which ideas belong to which boardrooms and how and why they're going to show up on X Y and Z platforms.
The internet full of Paying Consumers Who Vote Virtuously With Their Wallets knows what it wants, and it's just economical to give it just that and nothing more. The Fourth Wall can't be subverted anymore, because it simply isn't there.
Call me cringe if you must, but damn, I kind of miss 2013.