One of the most unusual and engaging games of the early 2010s was The Stanley Parable, an interactive walking simulator that was created as a mod for Half-Life 2. If you played the game back when it was first released in 2011, or when it was made available on Steam Greenlight in 2012 or for Windows in 2013, you likely still remember it — it was totally original and unlike any other game at the time, earning it a nod in our list of best Steam games and a nomination for our game of the year 2013. However, unfortunately for console users, the game was only ever available for the PC.
Now, seven years later, The Stanley Parable is back with an upcoming Ultra Deluxe edition that will have new content and will be available on consoles as well as PC. The developers haven’t announced which specific consoles the game will be available on, but at a guess it is likely to be available on the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and possibly the Wii U as well.
If you never played the original game, it’s hard to describe the plot without spoiling it. But trust us, it takes what you know about the way that games work and twists that concept to invite you into a narrative about storytelling, agency, and choice. The original game was quite short, running between 30 minutes and a couple of hours of play time depending on how fast you moved, but there were multiple endings which meant that you could play it over and over again and always find something new.
In typical style, the developers Crows Crows Crows announced the release of the deluxe edition with humor: “When The Stanley Parable came out, a lot of people asked us for more endings and more content. We told them it didn’t need more content, that it was fine just the way it was, that it already had the perfect number of endings. What a sorry sack of lies that was.”
The Ultra Deluxe version of the game will feature new content and new endings, making it something of an expansion of the original game. There should be a fair amount of this new content too — according to the developers’ website, “All in all, the new script is shaping up to be roughly half the length of the script from the original game.” The game will be available at some point in 2019, though an exact release date hasn’t been shared yet.
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