The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe
A meandering, interactive comedic meta-essay about games that focuses particularly on the player’s interaction with ludonarratives (a term coined by Clint Hocking in 2007, who had directed Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory two years prior), The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe (released in 2022) is an expanded version of The Stanley Parable (released in 2013), which is itself a remake of The Stanley Parable - a Half-Life 2 mod from 2011.
Roughly doubling the content of the original, taking the runtime from 2-3 hours to 5-6, The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe serves as a fun mediation on sequels, game promotion, and franchise. If you really loved The Stanley Parable, this is, without a doubt, more of it.
The Bottom Line
I’m tempted to call this game ‘self indulgent’, but perhaps that’s what it wants me to do? A large amount of The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe is dedicated to the writer, Davey Wreden, processing the wild success that The Stanley Parable had almost a decade ago. Davey Wreden also publicly processed the wild success of The Stanley Parable via 2015’s meandering, interactive, very non-comedic essay The Beginner’s Guide, which is a notoriously hostile game to talk about. I can’t help but feel that I would have preferred him to make something new and weird and different rather than just making more of The Stanley Parable, but, perhaps, that’s the joke, and perhaps, by desiring a different artistic output than the artist is willing to give me, I’m committing the same sin that Davey Wreden has the main character of The Beginners Guide (who is named Davey Wreden) commit.
The Bottomer Line
I liked the Bottomless Pit ending.