The Stanley Parable, Part Two

I used a walkthrough to see more endings of The Stanley Parable, and this is what I realized: The people who made this game aren’t necessarily critiquing casuals such as myself (although, in my defense, the first few endings sure make it seem that way). Rather, they seem to be critiquing the sort of “hardcore” or “professional” gamers who make unreasonable demands of developers. Some of the deeper endings seem to be responding to specific patterns of feedback that I can imagine would be genuinely frustrating.

I’m going to spoil two of these endings to illustrate this point.

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I resent the fact that the paths to the game’s more compelling endings are somewhat unintuitive if you’re not the sort of person who’s into speedrunning or exploiting glitches or whatever, but the endings themselves definitely make me feel more sympathetic to what the developers are trying to say.

I also learned that The Stanley Parable is $25 only on the Nintendo Switch store. Elsewhere, it’s only $15, which feels much more reasonable. Fucking Nintendo. I’m too shitty of a casual gamer to figure out how to access the “Ultra Deluxe” edition content – maybe you need to reinstall the game and then answer its opening questions in a specific way? – but I hope they added an ending about licensing fees.

2023 Writing Log, Part One

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I also took advantage of a sale at Costco and bought a giant tv. I bought my last tv in 2014, and wow. This is most surely an improvement. I actually had to go to Ikea to get a new stand big enough to support this monster. Now I get to play Breath of the Wild on a giant SHD tv, and it is glorious. Pics or it didn’t happen? (Okay!)