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The Stanley Parable is one of the most innovative games of the last years. It challenges your mind, contradicting everything you have previously known or heard about video games, making you play with the rules, and not by them. Do you have the opportunity of making real choices at games or at life? Never mind. To play or not to play: that’s the only question.
Stanley is introduced to us as an office worker with no other task than to push buttons in a determinate order. One day, his computer shut down and he has to think and start to figure out what is going on. Here starts the challenge: will you follow the narrator’s rules or will you experience alternative ways? But, if every action has a reaction already expected by the game designers, do you actually have a choice at any point at all? The only real choice would be to not play.
So, instead of just following rules to discover Stanley’s story (a never ending story), the reinvention of the rules once and again are the plot itself. Plot and player’s actions: they are the same thing, creating an unexpected twist to traditional game storytelling, opening a new path for gaming experience. There’s no ending: the end is never the end, it’s just the beginning of the next choice and the only way to finish it is to shut down.
If you’re interested in serious and the indie games industry, you MUST play this game – please notice the choice is only yours ;-). Could you imagine learning philosophy with games like this? The gate opened by The Stanley Parable take us to a world of possibilities for interactive storytelling by making our mind work instead of pushing buttons because the rules say so.
Find The Stanley Parable or play the demo version for free at Steam.
Do you really have an option?
