But most of all, I think that The Stanley Parable is a game about not being in front of the computer for a little while, as a treat. There’s an achievement you get for not playing the game for five years, and inThe Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe– a remastered version for consoles that adds some new content – there’s another achievement for ten. If they could implement an achievement for feeding all of your worldly belongings into a woodchipper and staggering naked into the forest to live with the animals, they probably would.
The original Stanley Parable arrived not long after Little Big Planet had launched, a seminal puzzle platformer in which a helpful British man – in this case the wonderful Stephen Fry, the ur-vocal-cords of this particular genre – explained how all of the various buttons worked, and what a human imagination was capable of. (Spoiler: it was anything.)
Almost overnight, tender-sounding white British men with warm cardigan voices, aged between 45 and 65, who spoke with an accent specific to parts of the south of England and certain educational institutions, were the hottest ticket in town. After centuries of being overlooked and taken for granted, their time had finally come.
When The Stanley Parable debuted, our obsession with being gently bossed around by an uncle-sounding-guy was reaching a fever pitch. Amazon had just dropped $300 million on Audible, a sort of daycare centre for our most reverberant voice artists. Stephen Fry was enjoying his meteoric rise to success in the now-resurgent audiobook format. ASMR had just broken into the mainstream, and wary parents still weren’t quite sure whether it was a sex thing or just a bit harmless Satanism. (As we now know, it turned out to be a little of both.)
If you don’t know: The Narrator guides Stanley’s story from beat to beat, foretelling the player’s next steps moments before they take them. At first his caramel-toned narration provides a helpful instruction as to how to proceed, which doors to enter and which bleak office corridors to walk down. But it’s not long before you realise you can defy The Narrator by following the wrong path, or standing still in a broom closet for a while, or breaking the story by using information you learned in a previous playthrough before the protagonist should rightfully know it. Impressively, the Narrator reacts to all of this with what I can only guess is approximately one billion lines of recorded dialogue. That’s why The Stanley Parable is brilliant, in one spoiler-free nutshell.
Far from being part of the trend, The Stanley Parable felt like a creative response to years of being told what to do by a series of melodious, middle-aged British men, who sound like they teach maths as a hobby and own a grandfather clock and play petanque on hot summer days in Devon. It encapsulated the rebellious desire to tell national treasure Stephen Fry – after he has patiently explained that you can grab objects by pressing and holding the R1 button – to shove the R1 button up his ass. And then, crucially, to have Stephen Fry reply with a bespoke pre-recorded line, hurt and astonished that you could say something so unbelievably cruel.
