Review: The Stanley Parable

Don’t read any reviews … except this one!

How do you review a game like The Stanley Parable? To describe any one part of it is to risk its ruination. To detail what it has to say about game design, the illusion of choice, and the psychology of the gamer is to tell you too much.

Comparisons, too, are going to be woefully inadequate. Perhaps its closest cousin would be Dear Esther, but where Dear Esther wastes the form of interactive entertainment, Stanley Parable uses and then subverts it. Where so many games that aspire to be more than games end up less than any form of art, Stanley Parable strives, and then succeeds, to be every game ever created. Even so, holding the game to the standards of any other title is simply not going to be correct.

So, how do you review what has become known as The Stanley Parable HD, the full-scale reimagining of one of the most intriguing mods available online? How do you discuss it, analyze it, and recommend it?

That’s quite simple.

You don’t.