This review contains spoilers
astonishing how much dedication they put into running with one of the least funny gags from the showcase area for nearly the entire runtime of the new content
The more I sit with this one, the less I like it. Wreden seems to like doing meta-commentary on the nature of being a "creator" but it's much better realized in The Beginner's Guide. Plenty of fun gags surrounding that (the steam review sequence was great) but once you get that god damned bucket the writing gets pretty lame pretty quickly.
The majority of the new endings just boil down to "the same thing but you have a bucket now". The bucket museum ending strikes me as particularly bad compared to the original one, but none of them are all that good. It's just not that funny of a gag and the game runs with it for so long. I think you could handwave this one off as like, a commentary of "oh well it's bad on purpose because it's supposed to say something about how making a sequel when a game didn't need one is bad", but then, like, make it good. Kane & Lynch 2 exists. If you're gonna make your game bad on purpose, go for broke and don't just do something that's kind of unfunny that I probably would have thought was funny when I was like, 13 playing the Stanley Parable for the first time.
The original (both mod and steam release) Stanley Parable was based around subverting expectations. When Ultra Deluxe does that, it's pretty good! Everything before the bucket is like a solid 8/10. Honestly seeing that "new content" door pop up made me grin like a stupid idiot with how hard the game read me, but again, once you get back into the normal cycle of things there just isn't much to take away from the experience, epilogue aside. And even then, the epilogue is really short, like it's actually maybe only 5 minutes long or something.
Idk, just kind of disappointing seeing this delayed for like 2 years just for this. Part of me thinks nothing could have matched my expectations, but like, the first couple hours of content did. The bucket is just really unfunny. It is a randem x3 reddit homestuck level joke and i mean that in the most negative way possible
The more I sit with this one, the less I like it. Wreden seems to like doing meta-commentary on the nature of being a "creator" but it's much better realized in The Beginner's Guide. Plenty of fun gags surrounding that (the steam review sequence was great) but once you get that god damned bucket the writing gets pretty lame pretty quickly.
The majority of the new endings just boil down to "the same thing but you have a bucket now". The bucket museum ending strikes me as particularly bad compared to the original one, but none of them are all that good. It's just not that funny of a gag and the game runs with it for so long. I think you could handwave this one off as like, a commentary of "oh well it's bad on purpose because it's supposed to say something about how making a sequel when a game didn't need one is bad", but then, like, make it good. Kane & Lynch 2 exists. If you're gonna make your game bad on purpose, go for broke and don't just do something that's kind of unfunny that I probably would have thought was funny when I was like, 13 playing the Stanley Parable for the first time.
The original (both mod and steam release) Stanley Parable was based around subverting expectations. When Ultra Deluxe does that, it's pretty good! Everything before the bucket is like a solid 8/10. Honestly seeing that "new content" door pop up made me grin like a stupid idiot with how hard the game read me, but again, once you get back into the normal cycle of things there just isn't much to take away from the experience, epilogue aside. And even then, the epilogue is really short, like it's actually maybe only 5 minutes long or something.
Idk, just kind of disappointing seeing this delayed for like 2 years just for this. Part of me thinks nothing could have matched my expectations, but like, the first couple hours of content did. The bucket is just really unfunny. It is a randem x3 reddit homestuck level joke and i mean that in the most negative way possible