The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe Review
The concept of returning to The Stanley Parable is a nigh impossible task. It stands alone as this video game creation with nothing ever quite reaching the same peaks that the original did. Does this expanded release/sequel add to the original in a way that is meaningful and important? That's really difficult to answer.
I had played the original Stanley Parable near to launch, meaning I had just shy of a decade away from the game. I remembered the narrator, I remembered the broom closet, and I had a rough idea of the ending concepts and the things I needed to do to see them. But it was very fuzzy. As such, I took it upon myself to try and play as much of the original game's content just to re-experience it. I found myself enjoying it, as expected, and was keen to see that the original still had something interesting and meaningful to say.
Due to the above, I took my time getting to the new content. I wanted to savor the original's experience before I added to it. This makes the game feel more complete and justified for the price at hand. A mixture of old and new into a single package, engaging in both aspects of the product in bits and pieces.
The new content is, of course, the thing which sets Ultra Deluxe apart from The Stanley Parable. The quality of it I found to be a tad more hamfisted and less engaging to access overall compared to the initial game. Where there was certainly funny and thoughtful moments, they were far more scripted and even more long winded than the initial game's content. That isn't especially a bad thing, the narrator is top notch and consistently has something interesting and engaging to say. It's just to say that I felt like some endings overstayed their welcomes by just a bit, and did not feel like they were punctuated by something truly interesting taking place consistently. One of the longest endings in the original Stanley Parable is the confusion ending, which constantly was flipping the script and doing interesting things. The sections going over New New content or the vent into the memory zone, which were generally high quality and interesting, feel like they are stretching their interesting content to the limit.
I want to highlight The Memory Zone content in particular as something to applaud. While the time in The Memory Zone is a tad long, reading significant chunks of reviews, it lead to some interesting commentary and let the audience see the narrator break down in a way that felt powerful. It truly stacked up as one of the most memorable pieces of Stanley Parable content, even if perhaps the path to get there could have been just a touch breezier.
Once the dust settles and the game goes 'mask off' that it is actually The Stanley Parable 2, which might I add is something crazy to earnestly write in a sentence, the new content opt in became the bucket. This is where I believe Ultra Deluxe stumbles just a bit. The bucket essentially lets you 'opt in' to new endings, but the actually routes you take to get these endings are the same as they were sans bucket. While it allows the narrative to play with the existing routes, I still wish that they expanded on the player choice on offer for the game. At the end of the day, I'm still taking the same gameplay path, except at the end I get a different resolution. I'm sure the developers did this as a conscious decision, as to add new choices and paths means that they would need to write new bucket and no bucket endings for this path, but it still is something that left me mildly disappointed.
At the end of the day, is Ultra Deluxe worth it? Did I feel content with my time and money spent on this product? Sure, yea. But only as someone who has held the original with significant reverence for at this point a large portion of my life. This is my return to this world, and I want to see how it is played with and augmented. If someone is earnestly interested in trying The Stanley Parable, I would implore them to look to the original first, and then come to Ultra Deluxe after a significant period of time, maybe a year or two. That way, some memories might be a bit fuzzy and the game can surprise you again.
