The Stanley Parable

The Stanley Parable is a difficult game to describe. This is not because of anything particularly confusing within the game itself; TSP is entirely story based, and the story is very straightforward. Rather, what makes the game difficult to describe is the nature of the story. It is a story that is wholly unique to the medium of video games, in that it can be different each time, and most importantly in that it is aware of this fact.

At this point, I find myself struggling with just how much of TSP I can describe without spoiling the experience  and the game is all about the experience. The gameplay is virtually nonexistent; the only actions that the player can take are pressing buttons, and making choices.

The Stanley Parable is, at its core, a game about choices. It's also a game about narrative, and about control, but only in how choice relates to them. It's core feature is that it is aware of the choices that the player is making as they play through it. I don't mean that systems built into the game track data and tabulate scores based on them, either. The game features a narrator who is wholly aware of the player and will interact with them. He tries to lead the player along a path, and becomes irate when the player deviates from it.

Again, I don't want to say to much about the game for the fear of ruining its experience. As it is, though, I imagine I've left plenty for you to experience on your own. Perhaps most interestingly, the experience is different from both a player's and a designer's perspective.

To a player, it's deeply compelling, and will make you think about any games you've played in the past  particularly those that featured choices. From a designers perspective, however, it becomes something else entirely. After playing it I found myself simply staring at my computer screen. It makes me, as a designer, rather acutely aware of what I do when I lead the player.

That's all I will say about it for now. The gameplay hardly warrants mention; as I've said previously it's barely there, instead narrowing it's focus solely to delivering the narrative, which is does remarkably.

The Stanley Parable is a mod for the Source Engine. It's free to download, so long as you have the engine, which is available through any Valve game, several of which are free themselves(and, of course, excellent). It takes anywhere between 7 minutes to about an hour of gameplay, depending on how thorough you wish to be, making it excellent to play in your free time.