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It starts with the modern hall of mirrors - a screen depicting a screen depicting a screen. I can count three of these before the detailing gets to small to make out, but even then I'm forgetting one. I'm forgetting the crucial one, in fact: my own screen that depicts the first of the virtual screens. And moving out beyond that?The Stanley Parable is a video game that plays you. It examines questions of control and free will within a finite interactive space and asks: can you truly express yourself in a world in which an omniscient designer has already carved out all of your possibilities in advance? Is there real victory to be won inside a machine that has been pre-programmed to deliver victory to you anyway? None of this makes The Stanley Parable sound like an enormous amount of fun, perhaps, but the whole thing's also hilarious and ingenious and even quietly disturbing at times. It's a game about games, yet it never forgets to be a game that's worth playing in its own right.
Davey Wreden created the original version as a Source mod that was released in 2011. Since then, he's been rebuilding it - and reimagining it - with designer WIlliam Pugh. The end result is not quite a straightforward remake. The story still revolves around Stanley, who toils deep inside an office complex where the staff are referred to by three digit numbers like Peugeots, and it still concerns a strange event in which all of Stanley's colleagues go missing, but the plot's branching paths have been tweaked and amended here and there, and entirely new options have been added throughout.
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