Indie Gaming | The Stanley Parable

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In The Stanley Parable, you inhabit the body of Stanley, a man who, despite working a monotonous office job, is completely content with his life. One day, everybody in Stanley’s office disappears. Guided by a disembodied narrator — voiced impeccably by British actor Kevan Brighting — Stanley ventures off to find out why nobody is there.

It’s impossible to say much more without ruining the game’s brilliantly disjointed story, which takes around an hour to experience in its entirety. There are multiple choices, paths and endings, all of which will leave you with many questions and absolutely no answers. But The Stanley Parable will leave you thinking, and that’s what Wreden is aiming for. “The whole point of the game is that there is no answer,” Wreden said in a phone interview ... “The entirety of the game is realizing what the question is in the first place.”

The Stanley Parable breaks the fourth wall constantly, acknowledging that it is a videogame, limited by the medium’s constraints. It also presents hypothetical questions about the nature of choice, posits a debate about reality and contradicts its own rules constantly.

Read the rest of the Wired article here. Click the link to play the game. Mac users need HL2.