The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe Review: Self-Referentiality in Extremis

The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe isn’t just recycling old content and adding new dialogue to it.

The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe
Photo: Crows Crows Crows

Davey Wreden and William Pugh’s 2013 game The Stanley Parable is a self-referential grappling with the illusion of choice in video games. From the start, it forces you to follow the instructions of the hilariously irritable Narrator or to disregard them. Sometimes that comes down to choosing between one of two doors, and as the game splits off in more interesting and often absurd ways from there, the baked-in commentary makes it impossible to ignore that it’s all about presenting you with binary choices. There are no wrong actions, though the Narrator may at times attempt to shame you for clipping through a window, attempting to unlock a meaningless achievement, or “breaking” the game.

The game’s new Ultra Deluxe edition continues in that irreverent fashion. It’s a pseudo-sequel in the guise of a console port with some nice new accessibility options that cannot stop riffing on the fact that the original game was pretty much already a masterpiece. At the very least, it’s committed, locking its most pretentious ending behind the task of clicking an annoying button for four hours in the name of art, and an achievement for not playing the game for 10 years.

Ultra Deluxe knows exactly what it’s doing in making the first of its new endings so underwhelming—the bonus content is that you can now jump, in a specific circle, exactly 36 times—that the Narrator (voiced again, brilliantly and hilariously, by Kevan Brighting) quits in disgust. When the game follows up with a jazzy new title screen for The Stanley Parable 2, it’s clear that it’s wearing its feelings about sequels and cash-grabs on its sleeve. But if you still don’t “get” it, the Narrator spends an entire branch reminiscing on (and reading reviews of) the original game, worrying about how this might tarnish its legacy.

YouTube video

This hyper-awareness isn’t just a joke, as the developers seem genuinely concerned with making sure that the game has something to say, so much so that there’s at least as much new content in this outing as in the original. The joke is that it does so in a rather shallow, if purposeful, way: by introducing a literal prop—the Reassurance Bucket—that players can pick up at the start of each reset. Should they do so, new dialogue and endings are generated for each of the old branches, giving players a good reason to revisit all the old sequences.

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To be clear, Ultra Deluxe isn’t just recycling old content and adding new dialogue to it. It’s filled with surprises ranging from an existential crisis revolving around the implications of a “skip” button to a philosophical game show about the nature of signifiers and an instructional video on proper comedic timing. A bucket is just the most tongue-in-cheek way to bring life back into a re-release, because the game clings to, rather than kicks, that bucket.

It feels natural for this game to speak to the superficiality of collecting Stanlerines (Stanley figurines) or unlocking a secret Epilogue, and it won’t be at all surprising if there’s a Super Ultra Deluxe edition 10 years from now with even more to say about the boundaries and freedoms of this interactive medium. There will never be an actual goal, nor any achievements for discovering the various branches. As the game puts it, “The End Is Never (the End).”

At the end of the day, players truly are Stanley, deriving pleasure and purpose from pressing buttons as prompted by the Narrator. This is a game that borrows a scene from Firewatch just to mock the concept of an open world and which sends up Steam user reviews—er, “Pressurized Gas” comments—and the idea of expectations and entitlement. Funny, right? But even if you’re not laughing with this exceedingly well-written game, it’s definitely laughing at you, and that’s as it should be for taking your entertainment so seriously.

This game was reviewed using a code provided by Crows Crows Crows.

Score: 
 Developer: Crows Crows Crows  Publisher: Crows Crows Crows  Platform: PlayStation 5  Release Date: April 27, 2022  Buy: Game

Aaron Riccio

Aaron has been playing games since the late ’80s and writing about them since the early ’00s. He also obsessively writes about crossword clues at The Crossword Scholar.

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