The Stanley Parable — gaming’s great postmodern experiment still inspires

The narrator introduces your character as Stanley, a pencil-pusher who one day stands up from his desk to realise his co-workers have vanished. “Stanley stepped out of his office,” the narrator says, so that’s what you do, walking over to an unremarkable room containing two doors. “He entered the door on his left,” the narrator says. This being a game, which door you actually pick is up to you. The choice seems banal, but its consequences could change the way you look at video games.

If you go into the door on the left, the narrator will keep telling his story, a satirical tale of brainwashed office workers in a dystopian corporation that concludes in 10 minutes. But if you disobey the narrator and take the right-hand door, that’s where the fun begins. The narrator at first adapts to your decision, continuing to chivvy you to follow the storyline he has laid out. Each time you can decide whether or not to obey.

So begins a battle of wits between character and narrator which frequently turns philosophical. You play through Stanley’s story over and over, each time making different choices which lead to a dizzying array of narrative permutations. Eleven years after its original release, the game has now received a substantial update as The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe. Any excuse to revisit gaming’s greatest experiment in postmodernism is a pleasure.

The Stanley Parable has influenced games and TV shows including recent Apple TV Plus series Severance, as well as featuring in House of Cards. Its concept draws from literary metafiction, particularly Italo Calvino’s playful novel If on a winter’s night a traveller, where the reader is enlisted on a journey. Where Calvino interrogates the relationship between writer, reader and text, The Stanley Parable explores gaming’s distinguishing feature as a narrative form: player choice.

This pursuit is infused with depth and humanity by the character of the narrator, voiced with superb plumminess by British actor Kevan Brighting. Games don’t usually have narrators because they obstruct the player’s sense of agency — here, that’s the point. Stanley’s narrator is both protagonist and antagonist. He can be blithe, comforting, maudlin, bitter or cruel, his dialogue written with absurdist humour reminiscent of Monty Python.

As you navigate the game’s fractal narrative branches, the relationship between narrator, player and character is disassembled across dozens of inventive and comedic vignettes. These include a virtual museum of the game’s own development including maquettes and framed screenshots; a scene where Stanley realises that there is a voice narrating all of his actions; and another where the narrator begins to suspect that Stanley is being controlled by a real person outside of the screen. The fourth wall is reduced to rubble.

The Stanley Parable questions whether games make us free or subjugate us

There is a great deal of new content in the updated edition, signposted by a door in the office labelled “New Content”. It is suitably meta, a satire on what it means to make a cash-grab gaming sequel. Its madcap new features are best left unspoilt.

The Stanley Parable asks: what is a game? What is a story? What is a choice? You return again and again to that room with two doors. You are free to choose, but only within the confines that the game developer provides, only ever between those doors. Games trade in the illusion of choice. This tension becomes the fissure that The Stanley Parable expands, questioning whether games make us free or subjugate us, giving us orders that we mindlessly follow, pushing buttons on our controllers like Stanley in his office cubicle.

In one of the game’s endings, the narrator says the only way to truly exercise freedom is to turn off your console. That or follow the instruction: “Press ‘triangle’ to question nothing.” If you are interested in an adventure that turns gaming inside out, you owe it to yourself to try out The Stanley Parable. But you don’t have to. The choice is yours. Probably.

‘The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe’ is out now on Nintendo Switch, PS4/5, Xbox One and Series X/S, PC and Mac