Stan the Man

This week I’ve been playing a lot of The Stanley Parable.

Like everyone else I came to this game through the some rather abstract descriptions of the game itself (that and everyone gushing about it). It seemed that everyone was recommending it but giving little to no explanation why. Well that’s enough to pique my curiosity so I picked up the game via Steam.

And I really enjoyed it.

Of course I’m going to keep up the trend via not going to give anything on this blog because doing so will most likely get me shouted down as ‘benefits of finding things out for yourself’ is the current trend on the Internet (I guess we can all blame Game of Thrones for that). But what I will say is that I think I enjoyed The Stanley Parable more than I enjoyed Portal.

I guess most of it can be attributed to my enjoyment of Portal being tainted with the ‘Cake is a Lie’ and ‘Still Alive’ jokes being run into the ground. This is not the case here: The rigidly little that has been revealed about The Stanley Parable beforehand has left me completely in the dark here and it’s worked wonders here. Thus there isn’t much more I can add here apart from giving credit to the narrator Kevan Brighting who really makes the game and delivers a VA performance to end all VA performances. In fact given a choice I would rather listen to the Narrator than GlaDOS (SHODAN was better anyway)

So in the end what The Stanley Parable proves is that there is indeed some value in allowing people to discover things for themselves. In fact I'm not sure how this game got greenlit by Steam but I'm certianly it did. I just hope nobody looks at The Stanley Parable the same way they did with the Companion Cube and sees a whole lot of marketing potential.....