#the stanley parable spoilers

[radio-ghost-cooks]

i'm so obsessed with The Narrator (the stanley parable spoilers!!!!!)

he's a bitch. he wants Stanley to escape more than anything. he's sadistic. he sounded like he was about to cry when Stanley didn't move. he got offended by a Steam commenter calling him "unfunny." he made a game where you push a button for four hours. he thinks rocket league is fun. he's hardly felt happiness before the Zending. he played jaunty adventure music while following the Adventure Line(TM). i fucking love him

[somberine]

I must keep the wheel turning. Keep the wheel turning. It must go forever. The end is never the end is never the end...

[pumpkinupsidedowncake]

My thoughts on the relationship between Stanley and the Narrator: they aren’t friends or enemies, but a complicated and unbreakable third thing.

They simultaneously desire and despise each other. Their existences are fundamentally intertwined as player and storyteller, the two entities with agency within the game. While they both have what the other needs, they are incapable of giving each other what they truly want.

The Narrator needs to have his story heard and appreciated. He wants Stanley to engage with the story correctly, to make all the right choices, because he believes that will satisfy his need for an audience. But the story’s a game, inflexible mechanics and plot beats interconnected by flexible pathways and choices. Stanley is creating the story alongside the Narrator. It can’t function without his engagement, and part of that engagement is deviating from the expected path, testing the boundaries of every rule, making wrong choices for the fun of it.

Stanley needs to be given meaningful choices. He wants to be able to take any action he sets his mind to, which is and will always be impossible in this medium. Games have hard limits to player agency, either because of system limitations or artistic choices. And for Stanley’s choices to have meaning, they must be defined, which involves stakes and forced limitations. Hunger mechanics, for example, constrain player choices by making eating food necessary for survival, but without them the choice to eat or not to eat means a lot less. While you definitely can and should choose to eat mushroom soup in minecraft creative mode, it will never have the same weight as eating your last bowl of it in hardcore mode. The limitation, the existence of wrong choices that you will be punished for making, is what makes all choices meaningful.

(Obviously there are other ways of defining meaningful choices outside of right/wrong or beneficial/non-beneficial. It all depends on how you define meaning, where it’s gotten from. In this case, its source is pretty extrinsic, but that is not always so, even within the Stanley Parable. However, I will continue to focus on meaning derived from narrative context, because it seems more relevant and this post will already be really long without all that.)

Stanley needs the Narrator to make his choices matter. And to have a game to make choices in in the first place. He needs to see the broom closet boarded up, to hear the Narrator’s response to his latest decision, to know that he has agency in this world, that his actions are meaningful.

Both of them want to “win”. To dominate the other. For the Narrator, the game is made of choices that are rewarded, pointless, or punished. For the game to be “won”, the player should choose the maximally rewarding options in the shortest time possible. He wants Stanley to choose correctly and in doing so validate his own pride in the story. Stanley wants to “win” by exerting his own agency. He delights in circumventing the Narrator’s plans, whether for the bit or out of spite. The game is found in confounding the Narrator.

These two definitions of winning are incompatible, obviously. Following the ideal path and refusing to do so. Despite this, they both desperately want the other on their side. Stanley wouldn’t still be playing if he didn’t need the story. He could simply not engage, either by sitting glumly in a corner or, on a meta level, doing anything other than playing a video game. And the Narrator wants Stanley to have a good time so badly. He gives Stanley the correct keypad code almost immediately so he can get on with experiencing the rest of the story, and constantly tells Stanley what he needs to do to advance. But because they are so opposed in their goals, discord is inevitable.

That conflict is made worse by each of them taking literally everything as a challenge. The Narrator views Stanley’s one deviation from his story in the Countdown Ending as a declaration of war because surely choosing his own path is equivalent to saying he doesn’t need the Narrator. In the Museum Ending, Stanley directly disregards the Narrator’s repeated warnings, and in every cargo lift scenario, he purposefully and continually ignores what he is supposed to be doing. And every hostile response begets a hostile reaction, even when it wasn’t meant as hostile, which causes an even more extreme response, and so on.

It’s so breathtakingly petty. And yet they need each other, or choose to need each other. Each loop of the game is formed by both parties deciding to stick around for “just one more run”. They are suspended in a sort of equilibrium, like the day and the night, always separate and opposed except for the rare yet inevitable moments where the sun meets the horizon. They are a song laden with tension and resolution, a call-and-response that feels predetermined and new, a conversation preordained and meaningless and so very important.

Can you see what I’m trying to say? I feel like I’m either repeating myself or jumping around too much. Anyway, yeah. Their relationship is the act of gaming, or one perspective on it. Engaging with an interactive work of art that was created long before you came along, yet which needs you and your input to function. It’s not a book or live improv, but some beautiful amalgamation of the two. The Stanley Parable explores this combination of scripted and un-scriptable through the conflict between the Narrator and Stanley. This is extremely cool and makes the should-have-been-an-english-major center of my brain go feral. As you can tell.

[lephalacat]

...Uh, just a small detail in Ultra Deluxe.....

Anyone else couldn't help but pause, when they saw this soap dispenser tube in the New Memory Zone?

How does Stanley or the Narrator even use this thing, do they wash their hands with this and it automatically enhances their memory, or do they rub it on their head or drink it or something?

...

Also why isn't it called the "Memory Enhancer" or something like that

[insertcleverurl]

it was all a one-act play, and I was Willie Loman. A damned fool who believed in something greater. But there was no happiness to be found.

Transcript under cut.

Men of faith tell us the afterlife is for eternity, but is it possible to keep your sanity for eternity? A day passes in the void. A month. A year. Two. Five. Ten. Is this an eternity? (March 1, 2023) Twenty years. A hundred years. A thousand years. I’ve sat in this room for a million years now entertaining the same thoughts, pondering the same questions, and ruminated on every mistake in my life… anguishing over them for centuries. A billion years now. Double that. Now double it again. I am still nowhere close to the end of eternity.

[starryoak]

Playing the new release of The Stanley Parable, and god, the ending where you go through the red door and throw yourself repeatedly off of the stairs is just… ): I don’t enjoy it! I don’t enjoy it because The Narrator sounds so genuinely happy when you get into the glowy room and he’s so genuinely distraught when you leave that it breaks my heart. I don’t like making the funny mean man sad! I want to make the funny mean man annoyed, not heartbroken!

[skiddoozle]

jim

[sugar-salt-sea]

i like to think that employee 432 made the Narrator visible after the epilogue and won't let him turn it off just so Stanley can fuck with him

[ieattaperecorders]

Stanley entered the basement and saw the Princess chained to the wall. Knowing that she would destroy the world if left alive, he took his blade and immediately slayed her.

...While talking to her first might seem like a safe choice, Stanley had already been told that the Princess cannot be trusted. Knowing that dropping his weapon would be a terrible mistake, he instead tightened his grip.

*irritated sigh* ...Although the blade had somehow slipped from his grasp, it was still nearby. Correcting his obvious fumble, Stanley reached for the blade and-- oh for God's sake, Stanley...!

[ketzel]

i literally just got into this an hour ago

[0ystersaucedrawsthings]

huge project from 2022ish that took over a year to finish!

I was honestly expecting The Stanley Parable Ultra Deluxe to stay in development hell forever but when it came out I fell in love instantly. the original game was one of the first video games I'd ever heard of/watched a gameplay of online so it felt so so awesome to witness the release of its follow-up and experience it as a player this time!

had to make something to pour out my love for this game and I decided on depicting some of my favorite moments in 3D! never made something like this before so I severely underestimated how long it would take, haha (all of the layers in this were cut out by hand with an x-acto knife).

detail shots below!

[egg-on-a-legg]

have we forgotten someone?

[pumpkinupsidedowncake]

Why. Why am I getting emotional about the Stanley button. Why did I press it again after hearing it, and again and again and again and it did nothing, it advanced nothing, it changed nothing, just gave me a lump of unnameable feeling and still I sat there, pressing it over and over, and something in me wanted to cry and the rest wanted to leave and I did, eventually, not because I was satisfied but because if I stayed any longer I would have to give in to that lump, give name to it, make the choice to be swept up in it.

Despite myself, I need to analyze this. It was a sad sort of emotional lump. Was it mourning? The opposite? Is mourning letting go or holding on? I was holding on, in that moment. To whatever I gained from hearing “Stanley” one more time.

[lephalacat]

...Just had a random Stanley Parable thought:

The Skip Button Ending, but what if it worked like... A certain room from the horror game OMORI. (...OMORI fans would know which one I'm referring to.)

Like,

You keep pressing the button until it breaks, but the room itself doesn't tear down. It doesn't let you out. After the button breaks, 'someone' asks you through a messy writing on the wall,

"Waiting for something to happen?"

...And THEN you realize that restarting has literally been the only option for you to escape. Also that you'd made the Narrator suffer for absolutely no frickin reason lol. Also, no desert at the end means no catharsis factor for anyone involved. At all.

(Whether he remembers the resets or not, is, well ... :p)

[queenburd]

“No, look, I’ve looked through this entire meager excuse for a story script, and it offers no explanation as to why we need to kill the princess other than this nonsense about ‘the end of the world’. Oh, I don’t know, this isn’t my area of expertise. I’m more of a—well, I prefer much cleaner stories about mind control and office buildings. None of this murder business. Well. Let’s just see what happens, I suppose. I’m not particularly picky one way or another with how this story goes. You decide, and I’ll do my best to narrate, yes? Alright. Let’s take it from the top.”

TSP narrator DLC route when

[lexumpysfunland]

Echos

Today I feed the lorrreee! I have only 2 asks to answer, but I didn't prepare anything for today, so I give you something else to compensate soon you'll be able to ask away as much as you want... almost there

the concept of these weirdos is simple... kind of- these are "Echos". They roam around the parable, usually out of the box generated for Stanley. on occasions, they find a way in, and the only thing they want is to find Stanley and just... apologize to him. All of them just want to do the same thing. They are born from outside the Box, so technically Walter is aware of them, but even if he kills them again and again, some will find a way in and terrorize the poor Stanley (not on purpose). They do have a voice, weirdly enough they seem to be trying to emulate Walter's voice as it's the only person they hear outside of Stanley's Box. Walter say they are dangerous so he will kill any of them, but they only seem to apologize...

alos have this for now. yeah I plan on making a mini comic to introduce the Echos properly in the future 👀